The CJEU ruled on the question of whether Articles 20 and 23 of the recast Qualification Directive (QD) must be interpreted as obliging Member States to grant the parent of a child who is a recognised refugee in a Member State a right to international protection in that Member State, if the family ties did not already exist in the country of origin.

The procedure was based on the appeal of a Guinean national against the rejection of an application for international protection issued by the CGRS. The applicant came to Belgium in 2007 and is the father of two children born in Belgium in 2016 and 2018, who were, like their mother, granted refugee status there. The applicant claimed that Article 23 of the QD had direct effect in the absence of timely implementation into Belgian law and therefore obliged Belgium to grant international protection as derived from the protection status of his child.

The Council of State, as referring court, stated that the best interests of the child and the right to family life could also be achieved if the father was granted a permanent residence permit in Belgium. The Council of State also questioned whether Article 2(j) and Article 23 of the QD were applicable in cases where the children were born in Belgium, even though Article 2(j) required that the family already existed in the country of origin.

The CJEU upheld the reasoning of the Council of State and ruled that, regardless of whether Article 23 of the QD was correctly implemented and regardless of the wording of Article 23(2) in conjunction with Article 2(j) of the QD, the applicant was not to be granted international protection as he himself did not meet the conditions for being granted such protection. The CJEU referred to its previous judgments in Nigyar Raul Kaza Ahmedbekova and Raul Emin Ogla Ahmedbekov v Deputy Chair of the State Agency for Refugees (Zamestnik-predsedatel na Darzhavna agentsia za bezhantsite) (C-652/16, 4 October 2018) and LW v Bundesrepublik Deutschland (C-91/20, 9 November 2021) and held that the recast QD did not provide for a derogation of international or subsidiary protection to family members who did not themselves meet the conditions for such a status. 

Based on the above, the CJEU answered the preliminary question insofar as stating that Articles 20 and 23 of the QD had to be interpreted as not obliging Member States to derive a right to international protection from a child to the parent.