Ruling sheds a small light on opaque intel-gathering on some citizenship seekers

On a summer afternoon last year, a little over 90 people trickled onto a Zoom call.

They were all citizens of Pakistan who’d come to speak to the country’s then-ambassador to Ireland, Aisha Farooqi. 

The people on the call shared a familiar limbo. Most had faced years-long delays for a decision on their citizenship applications, and been told that’s how long checking their background was taking.

“More than two years, more than two years for a straightforward application,” said one participant in Urdu. 

They wanted Farooqi to ask the Pakistani government if it’s being particularly slow to process deep-dive background check requests from the Irish government, causing the delays, they said.

A few days later, Rana Usman, president of Pakistan Overseas Community (POC) Ireland, sent a letter to the country’s Interior Ministry, outlining their troubles. 

It asked if they are getting background check requests from the Irish government.

And if not, “would the Ministry be willing to consult with relevant provincial or federal agencies to confirm whether such background checks might be routed through alternate channels?”

These background checks go beyond routine police clearances. Having a clean police cert isn’t enough to thwart a prolonged murky digging process. 

Up until now, Ireland’s Department of Justice had remained largely silent about where exactly it’s sending these data requests and why they take so long.

A few weeks into the new year, a High Court ruling that centred on prolonged background check delays for some citizenship-seekers shed a small light on the practice.

It cited submissions from the Department of Justice which said response time from some people’s countries of birth can be a “variable”.

But also, “by way of general background”, An Garda Síochána “has developed strong links with other security services, particularly those with whom the State shares common threats to national security”, said the submissions. 

It couldn’t say more about that, they said.

If the guards were to reveal the kind of data those security agencies offer they would risk “losing access to that intelligence and losing the relationships which are so important to protect the security of the State and its citizens”, said its submission.  

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not respond to queries sent last week, asking among other things, whether it refers to security agencies of other Western states, like those in the United States and the United Kingdom.

If it ended up refusing someone based on these intelligence reports, it would offer as much details as possible, its submissions in the court case had said.

A Supreme Court ruling from 2019, chronicles the contours of one man’s struggles to catch sight of the kind of information that the Department of Justice had held against him. More on that later. 

Legal academics and lawyers say that as invasive intel-gathering isn’t something all citizenship-seekers have to face, and is often based on stereotypes about people born in certain countries, it’s another reminder of those immigrants’ total loss of the right to privacy – whether for getting citizenship or something much smaller, like a taxi licence. 

Wrong is not my name 

The Department of Justice did not respond to a query asking for fresh figures.

But an analysis of past official figures of citizenship cases filed between 2020 and 2022 and still pending by April 2025, showed that citizens of Somalia, Iran and Afghanistan topped the list of undecided cases, despite an overall lower number of applications. 

People on the Zoom call with the ex-ambassador from Pakistan last year kept saying their cases were clear-cut and “straightforward”.

Some said they were doctors doing everything by the book, befuddled and hurt by the wait.

But just being born in some countries can be enough to make a citizenship case complicated and prolong the response time by summoning up an opaque background checks routine.

Cathal Malone, an immigration barrister, said the assumption is that people born in  certain places like, Muslim-majority countries, are “more likely to be terrorists”, and so the government might cast around for information on every facet of their lives. 

That’s literally profiling people based on place of birth or religion, he said.

Christopher Muhawe, assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois in Chicago – who explored the erosion of privacy rights for refugees and asylum seekers in the United States in a recent academic paper – said something similar. 

Nobody’s denying that national security concerns are valid and important, Muhawe said by phone on Monday.

The problem lies in the fact that not every citizenship seeker faces “excessive and extreme data collection in an opaque manner”.

On the Zoom call in June 2025, people said how painful it was to watch others get a decision on their citizenship applications in six to eight months.

What I don’t know did hurt me

Until a few years ago, if data from lengthy citizenship background checks triggered a rejection, seeking details was practically impossible. 

In 2013, a man born in Iran decided he’d trudge through a labyrinth of hurdles and legal bureaucracy on an odyssey to understand what had caused the Department of Justice to view him as a threat.

In April 2013, the Department of Justice had refused a citizenship application from the man, who held refugee status – so named only by his initials, A.P. – “on the basis of national security consideration”. It refused to offer any more details, even cursory.

Later, Mr Justice Paul McDermott at the High Court would rule that “there was nothing to inhibit the Minister from providing both a reason for the refusal of the application and a justification for the withholding of any information pertaining to the underlying basis for that reason”.

So, the Department of Justice reviewed and rejected A.P.’s citizenship request again in 2014. This time offering tidbits of information as to why.

He turned to the courts again, arguing that it wasn’t enough, facing setback after setback at the High Court and then the Court of Appeal. 

By the time the Supreme Court ruled on his case, six years had slipped by since his first citizenship refusal.

Affidavits filed by the Department of Justice alluded “to the existence of certain confidential documents concerning the application and Mr. P.’s background”, said a 2019 Supreme Court ruling about the case by then-chief justice Frank Clarke.

His ruling cited the Department of Justice as saying that the Minister couldn’t count on A.P.’s “fidelity to the Irish State and his undertaking to faithfully observe the laws of the State and to protect its democratic values”.

They had reached that conclusion based on those confidential reports, the ruling said.

Justice Clarke, who overturned the Department of Justice’s decision to reject A.P.’s citizenship request, said “the entitlement to know the case against you is itself a fundamental part of the right to be heard”.

At the very least, he wrote, steps can be taken to put in place an"enhanced" process through which people can seek details of the case against them without affecting state interests. 

Now, off the back of that ruling, those facing a citizenship refusal over security concerns are offered a window of time to ask a single-person committee to review the confidential case against them and decide whether they can know anything about it.

It’s unclear how much the system has eased people’s access to information.

Through the eye of the needle 

Malone, the immigration barrister, remembers how a client, Imran Shuvu, had been refused renewal of a taxi licence because the Garda carriage office had dug into every twist and turn in his immigration history, deciding his character wasn’t good enough to drive a cab.

It had viewed files held by the Garda National Immigration Bureau, which suggested that Shuvu – who was born in Bangladesh – had at one point been accused of marrying for immigration papers by the Department of Justice.

Later, a District Court judge, Marie Quirke, would rule that the invasion of his privacy was undue and illegal. It was a “deliberate and conscious” breach of his data protection rights, the judge had said.

In overturning the decision to refuse renewal of his taxi licence, the judge said the guards could have asked Shuvu’s permission to access his immigration files or asked him to offer the information they sought voluntarily.

What makes this case unique, Malone said, is that Shuvu’s right to privacy would not have been peeled away if he wasn’t an immigrant from Bangladesh.

If an Irish citizen was going for a taxi licence renewal, he said, “they wouldn’t write to every department and say, ‘Do you have anything dodgy on this guy?’”.

Getting to know all about you

In his paper, Muhawe, the law professor at the University of Illinois, mentions how immigrants act differently as they strain for acceptance. 

He calls it “personality curation”. Some people change religion just to be accepted, said Muhawe on Monday.

“The undue self-discipline, subordination, loss of self-esteem and erasure of personal identity and history prompted by the need to appear acceptable to authorities,” his paper said.

And the willful surrender of all kinds of private things just so they can make a go of life outside their country of birth. “Prompted by the overwhelming need of the powerless to survive,” said Muhawe’s paper. 

Those looking to join their partners here often hand over a mountain of private, sometimes deeply intimate, romantic chats to the Department of Justice to prove that their relationship is real.

On Monday, Muhawe said he found the area under-researched when he set out to mine the literature. 

He thought it was ironic that immigrants are talked about all the time – “I always say refugees and asylum seekers can determine the election even though they don’t vote” – but there is so little about how much governments surveil them. 

He tried to make a point of that in picking a title for his research, he said: “The (In)visible Immigrants’ Privacy”.

Enveloping “in” before “visible” in parentheses was intentional, said Muhawe, to portray the hyper visibility of immigrants in public discourse and to immigration officials, and contrast it with the unseen violation of their right to privacy.

“It is vital to safeguard the (in)visible immigrant’s privacy because the protection of privacy is integral to upholding human dignity in any democratic society,” said his paper.

Western democratic governments, Muhawe said, should be transparent about the kind of data they dredge up on some people in a biased selection process.  

The data-gathering methods, who’s exactly offering it, how long the government hangs on to it, he said. 

If the tables were turned, he said, Europeans wouldn’t settle for less.