The applicant, a Syrian woman sought family reunification with her spouse and the couple's two children in 2017. The spouse was granted asylum in Norway in 2017. The marriage was entered into in 2012 in Syria, before the woman turned 13, and the children were born when she was 13 and 16, respectively. The immigration authorities rejected the application and invoked that it would be offensive based on the Norwegian legal order to accept marriage as a basis for residence, cf. Section 18a of the Marriage Act. The application was rejected by the Norwegian authorities on the basis that at the time of marriage – which was contracted lawfully in Syria in January 2012 - the refugee’s spouse had not reached the age of majority.

The Supreme Court annulled the decision to reject the family reunification application. The Supreme Court pointed out that a long time had passed, that the applicant was well past the Norwegian marriage age and had a real desire to continue cohabiting with the spouse, and that the best interest for the children would be to grow up with both parents. The Supreme Court held that it would not be obviously offensive to the Norwegian legal order that the marriage was accepted as a basis for family reunification.

The Supreme Court highlighted that the applicant was granted refugee status in Norway. The Court underlined that in cases where the family separation is linked to the need for protection/asylum, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights has decided that more weighty considerations are needed to justify that a refusal to issue a residence permit for purposes of family reunification is a reasonable and proportional interference with the refugee’s right to respect for family life. In the assessment of whether the refusal constitutes an appropriate measure to achieve the political goal of combating forced marriages, the Supreme Court noted that refusal to issue a permit in the present case would hardly lead to fewer forced marriages with children in Syria or elsewhere if a residence permit is denied.