The applicant is a Nicaraguan who lived and worked in Costa Rica for 22 years. She met her Dutch husband and had a daughter with him in Costa Rica. Since 2014, the family lived in Nicaragua, and her husband and daughter moved to the Netherlands in 2016. Due to alleged problems in Nicaragua that occurred afterwards, she left for the Netherlands in 2018 and applied for asylum. On 12 May 2020, the State Secretary rejected her application as inadmissible, holding that Costa Rica is a safe third country for her and given her previous stay in Costa Rica, she had links with that country and was reasonably able to apply for asylum there. The applicant appealed the decision stating that the principle of reasonableness (the fact that she could reasonably apply for asylum in Costa Rica) was interpreted too narrowly.

The court has rightly considered that in these proceedings, directed against the inadmissibility of an asylum application, it is not the question whether the foreign national is entitled to a right of residence on the basis of her family life. Only when an asylum application is dealt with in detail does the State Secretary ex officio perform a test against Article 8 of the ECHR. Furthermore, such a test can also be relevant for a regular residence application.

2.3. However, this does not mean that in a procedure such as this the State Secretary could simply disregard any circumstance relating to the foreign national's family life. After all, the scope of the reasonableness test, as described above, includes a duty for the State Secretary to properly motivate that it is reasonable to expect a foreign national to travel to a safe third country and apply for asylum there, taking into account all individual circumstances that are relevant to the assessment of the link an alien has with the invoked safe third country. In this case, this includes the circumstance that, unlike during the period of residence of the foreign national in the safe third country opposed by the State Secretary, the family of the foreign national is no longer present there. Contrary to what the court has considered, the fact that this circumstance also affects the foreign national's interest in carrying on her family life in the Netherlands is insufficient to exclude that circumstance entirely in the context of the reasonableness test.

The first appeal was dismissed and the secon appeal before the Council of State was allowed and the decision was quashed. It held that the scope of the reasonableness test includes a duty for the State Secretary to properly reason that it is reasonable to expect a foreign national to travel to a safe third country and apply for asylum there, taking into account all individual circumstances that are relevant to the assessment of the link the person concerned has with the safe third country. In this case, this includes the circumstance that, unlike during the period of residence of the foreign national in the safe third country opposed by the State Secretary, the family of the foreign national is no longer present there. The fact that this circumstance also affects the foreign national's interest in carrying on her family life in the Netherlands is insufficient to exclude that circumstance entirely in the context of the reasonableness test.