Check your emails – Check your ImmiAccounts!!!
It was surprising to learn how visa applicants’ lives can be adversely affected to learn that their visas were refused and that they are out of time to make an application for merits review.
It doesn’t matter if you did not receive an email from DOHA notifying you of a refusal decision because the email was automatically sent to your junk mail. DOHA is not required to evidence that their emails left their server.
This may sound unfair but case officers follow Departmental policy where the Federal Court decision of Sainju continues to be the leading authority. The court decided that “transmitting the document” relate to the “sending” of the document and do not imply that actual communication must have occurred.
Best Practice
Unless, you have six sense (humour shared by a recent client of mine), set reminders to check your immiaccount. Ensure that the DOHA’s email domain name is permanently whitelisted as “not junk”.
What If You Are Affected?
If this has already happened to you, the immediate step is to:
(a) preserve your bridging visa
(b) argue defective notification (this is different to not receiving the refusal decision) and request that you are re-notified. When you are renotified, the time limit to appeal, recommences.
Under desperate circumstances, my colleague, recently argued that the visa applicant failed to make a valid application. In effect, DOHA had no power to make a decision under s65 of the Migration Act and thus, the visa applicant was not barred under s48A to make another application for protection visa.
Another colleague of mine successfully, vacated the primary decision, despite the fact it was protected as a privative clause decision.
Share your story with me to learn more tricks in the trade.