The claimant in this case, a barrister, was first temporarily appointed as Chair of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (R.A.T) in December 2003 and this appointment was to cover the period up to the filling of the post by open competition. He applied for that competition and was appointed to the post under a five year fixed-term contract up to September 2010. 

Towards the end of this term, he expressed an interest in being re-appointed and wrote to the Department of Justice in this regard. Because a new body to be called the Protection Review Tribunal was envisaged at the time to replace the R.A.T, the Secretary General of the Department in reply offered to continue the claimant in his post temporarily until such time as a new Chair of the R.A.T who would be Protection Review Tribunal Chair–Designate was appointed following an open competition and he was informed that it would be open to him to apply for that post when the time came. He accepted this offer and in September 2010, he continued in the job on these terms – in effect under a specified purpose contract to continue to act as Chair until a new Chair was appointed. 

In March 2011, he was informed by letter that the respondent did not now intend to go ahead with the appointment of a Chair–Designate of the Protection Review Tribunal. Instead, the respondent decided to appoint a new Chair of the R.A.T. The claimant was not selected for that post and his temporary contract came to an end when the new Chairperson was appointed. 

The claimant brought a complaint under the Act before a Rights Commissioner (RC), claiming that his last contract, issued in September 2010, had ‘transmuted’ to one of indefinite duration under the terms of Section 9 when the respondent changed its mind and decided not to appoint a Chair–Designate of the Protection Review Tribunal. In effect, this amounted to arguing that the objective grounds that had existed at the time his contract was extended could no longer be relied upon by the respondent. 

The RC appears to have found against him on the grounds that the terms of the Refugee Act 1996 effectively prevented the State from appointing a Chair of the R.A.T under a contract of indefinite duration at all. On appeal on this particular point, the Labour Court disagreed with this conclusion and took the opportunity to reiterate that any rights that accrued to a claimant under the Act and the directive that it transposed “could not be offset or supplanted by a provision of purely domestic law”.

However, the Court did dismiss his appeal nonetheless. It accepted that at the time the claimant’s contract was renewed, the respondent believed that the body to which he was being appointed would shortly cease to exist and that it was not suggested that this did not amount to an objective justification for such a renewal at the time. It found that the decision of the High Court in Russell v Mount Temple Comprehensive School (Unreported, High Court, Hanna.J, 12th December 2009) was clear authority for the proposition that where objective grounds exist for the renewal of a fixed-term (or specified purpose) contract on the date on which the contract is renewed, they cannot be rendered unlawful by subsequent events. 

In this case, the requirements of legal certainty dictated that the lawfulness of the renewal could not be affected by the subsequent decision of the respondent not to proceed in the manner originally envisaged.

Read the full case here: 
http://bit.ly/16q3r3Y