Minister for Immigration and Border Protection v CED16

The High Court of Australia considered an appeal by the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection concerning a protection visa application. The primary dispute involved whether the Immigration Assessment Authority (the Authority) was entitled to consider a particular certificate when reviewing a delegate's decision to refuse the visa. The Authority's review process is governed by Part 7AA of the *Migration Act 1958* (Cth), which generally restricts the Authority to considering "review material" provided by the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and ordinarily prohibits consideration of "new information" unless specific exceptions apply.

The central legal questions before the High Court were whether an invalid certificate, which purported to certify that disclosure of information within an identity assessment form was contrary to the public interest, constituted "new information" under section 473DC(1) of the *Migration Act*. This also required the Court to determine if the certificate was a "document" or contained "information" for the purposes of the Act, and whether the Authority could be inferred to have considered that the certificate might be relevant to the conduct of its review, despite its invalidity and its absence at the time of the delegate's original decision.

The High Court reasoned that the certificate, even though invalid, was a document containing information. Crucially, it was not before the delegate when the original decision was made, and it was not included in the "review material" as defined by the Act. Therefore, it constituted "new information" within the meaning of section 473DC(1). The Court held that the Authority was not obliged to consider this new information, as the conditions for its admission were not met. The appeal was allowed, the orders of the Federal Court were set aside, and the appeal from the Federal Circuit Court was dismissed, meaning the original decision to refuse the protection visa would stand.