Berthold, Re Application for Judicial Review [2026] NIKB 29 (17 June 2026)

Executive summary

The court considered an application for leave to seek judicial review against the Chief Constable of the PSNI and the Secretary of State for the Home Office. It refused leave against the Chief Constable because the restraining orders and the refusal to discharge them were decisions of the court, not the police, and therefore the Chief Constable was not the proper respondent.

Key points

• Applicant: Holger Berthold, a German national in immigration detention pending deportation to Germany.
• Respondents: Chief Constable PSNI and Secretary of State for the Home Office.
• Holding: leave to apply for judicial review against the Chief Constable was refused.
• Reasoning: the challenged restraining orders were made and later refused discharge by the magistrates’ court; the Chief Constable had no power to alter those orders.
• The judgment records the applicant’s attempt to link the restraining orders to later deportation and detention decisions by the Home Office, but the core ruling on the PSNI claim was jurisdictional/procedural rather than substantive.
• No sanctions or export-control issue appears in the source text.

Why it matters

The case is relevant to sovereign-risk and enforcement analysis because it shows how downstream immigration consequences can be tied to domestic criminal and restraining-order proceedings, but the judicial review route can fail at the threshold if the wrong public authority is sued. It also illustrates how criminal-court orders can become part of a broader administrative detention/deportation matrix without generating any public-law liability for the police.

Implications

For compliance and litigation strategy, the decision underscores the need to identify the actual decision-maker before launching judicial review: where the impugned act is a magistrates’ court order, the police are not the proper respondent. For enforcement actors, it reinforces that later immigration consequences do not convert an earlier court-made restraining order into a police decision, limiting the scope for collateral public-law challenges against the PSNI.