The judgment concerns the interpretation of Article 14(4)(b) of the recast Qualification Directive in a case between M.A., a third-country national, whose request for international protection was dismissed, and the State Secretary for Justice and Security in the Netherlands.

M.A. lodged a request for international protection in the Netherlands on 5 July 2018, which was rejected by the State Secretary on 12 June 2020 as it was considered that although M.A. had a well-founded fear of being persecuted in his country of origin, given that he had been convicted of a particularly serious crime by a final decision of a Dutch criminal court in 2018 (imprisonment of 14 months for three sexual assaults, attempted sexual assault and theft of a cell phone), he was considered to constitute a threat to society. M.A. appealed the decision and a first instance appeal court ruled in his favor, holding that the State Secretary did not provide sufficient reasons, first, that the acts committed were of a seriousness such that they justified the refusal to grant him refugee status and, secondly, that he constituted a real, present and sufficiently serious danger for a fundamental interest of society. The State Secretary appealed before the Council of State which referred questions to the CJEU for preliminary ruling.

According to the Press release of the CJEU of 6 July 2023, the CJEU considered that "a revocation/refusal measure may be applied only to a third-country national who has been convicted by a final judgment of a crime the specific features of which enable it to be regarded as of exceptional seriousness, in so far as it is one of the crimes which most seriously undermine the legal order of the community concerned. That degree of seriousness cannot, moreover, be attained by a combination of separate offences, none of which constitutes per se a particularly serious crime. The assessment of that degree of seriousness entails an assessment of all the specific circumstances of the case concerned, such as, inter alia, the nature and quantum of the penalty provided for and, a fortiori, of the penalty imposed, the nature of the crime committed, any mitigating or aggravating circumstances, whether or not that crime was intentional, the nature and extent of the harm caused by that crime and the nature of the criminal procedure applied to punish that crime."