High Court judge calls for crackdown on ‘bogus marriages’

Mr Justice Richard Humphreys made the remarks while delivering a reserved judgment in the case of a 45-year-old Algerian man, who contested his deportation order on the basis of his marriage to a Hungarian woman.

Mr Justice Humphreys dismissed the man’s application and lifted an injunction restraining his deportation.

He said: “In the interests of the human rights of those involved there is a clear duty on the State to make huge efforts to prevent such bogus marriages in future.”

The judge also called for State agencies to “prevent, root out, and revoke bogus marriages”.

Concern about marriage being used to circumvent immigration rules led to the Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014, under which registrars can investigate the veracity of a marriage application.

However, some legal professionals say the legislative changes will lead to racial profiling of would-be married couples.

Dublin solicitor Wendy Lyon, who specialises in immigration and refugee law, has described the measures as “unavoidably racist”.

Writing for her blog last year, she said: “What the new law actually does, then, is create a principle that two people may lawfully consent to marriage for any reason whatsoever except to gain an immigration advantage.

“There is only one category of people whose reasons for getting married can be lawfully (and, it must be said, quite intrusively) interrogated and – well, what do you know! – they happen to be non-EU nationals.

“In practice, of course, they are likely to only be certain types of non-EU nationals, specifically the brown ones.”