Thompson, Re Application for Judicial Review [2025] NIKB 29 (20 May 2025)

Executive summary

The court considered an application for leave to seek judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal’s decision to specify the Court of Appeal in England and Wales as the relevant appellate court for any appeal from the Tribunal’s decision on the applicant’s complaint. The underlying complaint concerned alleged security-service conduct connected to the investigation of her father’s 1987 murder, but the judgment excerpt focuses on the procedural legality of the appeal forum under RIPA rather than the merits of those allegations.

Key points

• Applicant: Noreen Thompson; respondents: the Investigatory Powers Tribunal and the Secretary of State for the Home Department.
• Core issue: whether the IPT acted lawfully under section 67A of RIPA by designating the Court of Appeal in England and Wales, rather than the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, as the appeal court.
• The IPT had dismissed the complaint for lack of jurisdiction under section 65 of RIPA, saying the relevant events pre-dated RIPA/HRA and/or were not in challengeable circumstances.
• The judgment records that the applicant declined to file an appeal in England and Wales, so there was no extant appeal at the time of the judicial review proceedings.
• The applicant’s constitutional objection was that a Northern Ireland matter should not be appealed to an English court.
• No sanctions or export-control issue arises on the face of the judgment; the case is about investigatory powers, tribunal jurisdiction, and appellate routing.

Why it matters

This is relevant to sovereign-risk and national-security monitoring because it concerns the legal architecture for challenges involving the UK intelligence services and how those disputes are routed across UK jurisdictions. It also shows how procedural design can shape access to review in sensitive state-secrecy and investigatory-powers litigation.

Implications

For compliance and litigation strategy, the decision highlights that forum selection under RIPA can be outcome-determinative: an appellant may be forced into an England-and-Wales appellate route even where the underlying facts are in Northern Ireland. For enforcement and challenge planning, parties should assume that jurisdictional objections, not just merits arguments, may control whether any appeal is practically pursued at all.