Federal Court. DFQ17 held that a visa refusal notification letter must clearly convey the deadline for an application for merits review in order to comply with s 66(2)(d)(ii). Here, the following sentence was found under the heading "Registries of the [AAT]": "As this letter was given to you by hand, you are taken to have received it when it was handed to you". Did the place of that sentence render the notification unclear? The letter also read: "As you are in immigration detention, the prescribed timeframe commences on the day on which you were notified of this decision, and ends at the end of seven working days (beginning with the first working day that occurs on or after that day)". Did the latter sentence precisely track reg 4.31(1)?
Some of the questions to the Federal Court (FCA) were as follows:
Question 1: Is there an inconsistency in the approaches of the Full Courts in DFQ17 and BMY18 on the one hand, and Singh on the other hand?
Question 2: Here, page 3 of the notification of visa refusal started with the sentence: "As this letter was given to you by hand, you are taken to have received it when it was handed to you" under the heading "Registries of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal". Did the place of that sentence make render the notification unclear?
Question 3: The notification also read: "As you are in immigration detention, the prescribed timeframe commences on the day on which you were notified of this decision, and ends at the end of seven working days (beginning with the first working day that occurs on or after that day)". Did that sentence precisely track reg 4.31(1) of the Migration Regulations 1994 (Cth)?
The FCA answered those questions as follows: