Some lawyers who judge asylum appeals have gone on strike

Several solicitors and barristers who sit part-time on the International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) stopped doing that work this month, over low pay.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice confirmed the strike, saying that a number of lawyers at IPAT had asked for a pay rise for deciding appeals.

It’s currently considering their ask, along with the Department of Public Expenditure, the spokesperson said.

“Any reduction in availability from Part-Time Tribunal Members for oral hearings does not affect paper-based work and appeal cases will continue to be determined this month,” the spokesperson said.

The strike comes as the number of cases before the tribunal has ballooned by over 646 percent, rising from 1,180 in 2022 to 8,808 in 2024, official figures show.

It also comes as the government has lowered the required qualifications for who can be an IPAT member in an effort to make it easier to recruit more, to process more asylum appeals faster.

Tribunal members’ contracts say they aren’t allowed to talk to reporters, a tribunal member said in a text message last week.

Other immigration lawyers say they’re not surprised about the strike. “The only thing that surprises me is that it has taken this long for a strike to happen,” said Cathal Malone, an immigration barrister.

The IPAT strike also spotlights overall underfunding of legal aid for defending asylum cases, says Stephen Kirwan, who sits as a private lawyer at the Legal Aid Board’s international protection panel.

“It disincentives anyone from doing any work. If you’re looking for justice on the cheap, [lawyers] gonna go elsewhere to find work,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Board did not respond directly to a query sent last week asking if there were plans to lift up fees. But she did say that in 2023 the board’s international protection panel had 93 solicitors, and in 2024 it had 123.

Faster and faster

In November 2022, the Department of Justice rolled out a fast-tracked asylum process for people from a list of “safe” countries.

Last year, it cranked the policy up a notch and expedited asylum cases from citizens of countries with the top two highest numbers of applications.

Meanwhile, the overall number of asylum cases has been climbing – and the number of appeals by people who’ve been denied asylum that are sent to the International Protection Appeals Tribunal has increased too.

Immigration lawyers had said in the past that fast-tracking cases without easing access to initial proper legal support creates more appeals and court cases.

Fairness enhances efficiency, according to a recent policy brief from the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, which looked at Switzerland as a case study.

Now, the 2025 draft programme for government promises to speed the process up even more.

It pledges that “New domestic legislation will be enacted in 2026 to provide for faster processing of applications” and says that the government plans to replace IPAT with “a new faster appeal system”.

Tackling the increase in appeals

Having enough capacity for efficient decision-making is key to fairness in fast-track asylum processes, according to the recent policy brief from the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW.

The 2025 draft programme for the government doesn’t mention investing in asylum legal aid for better legal support to lower the number of appeals and judicial reviews.

Instead, it says the government will try to find ways to limit people’s right to bring appeals

For example, making it possible to hear someone’s judicial review once they have “left the jurisdiction”, it says.

For those who are still allowed to appeal, the draft programme for the government also mentions beefing up resources “to ensure appeals are dealt with quickly”.

Pay for deciding appeals

Rates for reviewing appeals vary depending on the work involved.

For regular “slow-track” cases, oral hearings pay the most (€730 for one person). The pay is more (€1,095) if an applicant has a spouse or partner with a similar case – and even more if their partner has a different case (€1,460). For a “Papers only” appeal for a single applicant, the fee is €490.

For regular fast-track cases, there are no oral hearings. And fees for reviewing those appeals are much lower than for slow-track ones. Ruling on one person’s expedited appeal pays €248.

Those appeals are from people whose countries are deemed generally “safe”, and they have to rebut that presumption. Or from citizens of countries with the highest number of cases in any quarter.

That means those lower-paid cases make up a big share of work on tribunal members’ docket.

Kirwan, the solicitor, says fast-track cases often involve credibility disputes, which ideally means that it’s more work to reconsider them fairly. It shouldn’t pay so badly to review them, he said.

Tribunal members need lots of reading and proper engagement with applicant’s claims and different reports about what’s going on in their country of birth.

“There’s no decision, that’s, you know, less than 15 or 16 pages,” Kirwan said.

Experts leaving

At the heart of the IPAT members’ strike are the recent changes in the law, which loosened recruitment conditions for IPAT, say Kirwan and Malone.

“Being a Tribunal Member is a difficult job which requires a high level of legal expertise,” says Malone, the barrister.

Kirwan says low pay is only going to push more practising lawyers out of IPAT. And now they can be replaced by legal academics or people “in a profession that corresponds substantially to the profession of solicitor or barrister”.

“They’re not gonna get top-level candidates to apply because the rate of pay is so low,” he said.

Fast-tracking the asylum process shouldn’t be a “cost-cutting exercise”, but it has turned into one, Kirwan says.

In May 2024, IPAT had listed 57 part-time tribunal members besides its chairperson and deputies and full-time members on its website. The number jumped to 92 late last year and dropped to 88 this week.

Decision to stay

Fees for representing people seeking asylum before the tribunal are even lower than the fees for IPAT members hearing the appeals.

Private lawyers on the Legal Aid Board’s international protection panel get paid €300 to help with one person’s initial asylum interview, and if a person’s case is refused €400 to draft an appeal and represent it for a “slow-track case” or €250 for a fast-track appeal.

And lawyers often have to split the workload and so the fee with a barrister, Kirwan says. He does that, too. “Because there’s so much work involved,” he says.

He points to a September 2020 external government advisory group’s report on offering support to people seeking asylum, which said preparing to represent a case up to the first decision takes around 20 hours.

“It can only be a matter of time before [legal aid lawyers who appear before IPAT] join the picket line,” says Malone, the barrister.

Low pay especially discourages junior lawyers from becoming public defenders of asylum cases, says Kirwan.

He will stay because his heart is in the job, he said. “Frankly, if they cut the pay again, look, I’m probably going to be doing this in ten years’ time.”

But not all lawyers feel that way, Kirwan says, and they might want to leave for areas that pay better.

Because “it doesn’t make a whole lot of business sense”, he says.

And it is people seeking asylum who suffer as their access to justice narrows, he said. That’s unfair, Kirwan says. “My view is that everyone is entitled to justice.”

UPDATE: This article was updated with additional information at 13.25 on 22 Jan. 2025, in two ways: 1. to say that the number of solicitors on the Legal Aid Board’s international protection panel grew between 2023 and 2024 and giving figures for that; and 2. to say that the €300 fee for helping with one person’s initial asylum interview is for lawyers specifically on the international protection panel.