Judicial Review in a Federal Court or Court of a State of Australia
Judicial Review concerns the legality or “legal correctness” of administrative decisions, including those of Ministers, Governments, Commissions, and Tribunals that affect the rights, interests, or legitimate expectations of persons or entities. This is usually the option of last resort for an applicant, and it is undertaken when all other options for challenge are not available.
In the Migration law context, when an adverse migration decision has been made by an administrator (for example a delegate of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection or a tribunal such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), the affected party may wish to consider whether to seek judicial review of the decision.
In most but not all cases one has to exhaust available avenues of merits review before the relevant tribunal before seeking judicial review on the ground of a significant error of law or what is called “jurisdictional error”. In practice, therefore, most applications for the judicial review of migration decisions seek to challenge the decision of a tribunal in the appropriate Court.