A founding member of the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, Sunniva McDonagh, has called for the publication of its decisions to allow for a consensus about best practice to emerge and to reveal inconsistencies.
She also called for independent representation for separated minors who come before the tribunal.
Ms McDonagh, a member of the tribunal since November 2000, made her comments in the current issue of the Bar Review.
She was responding to an article in The Irish Times in which the Master of the High Court criticised aspects of the operation of the tribunal, citing the High Court's experience of judicial reviews of its decisions.
She said that a blanket criticism of the tribunal was unwarranted, pointing out that she had heard over 600 cases, and none of her decisions was successfully judicially reviewed.
However, she acknowledged that it was unsatisfactory that some 400 judicial reviews had been taken, the majority of them successfully, against the tribunal.
"One major obstacle in relation to assessing the performance of the tribunal is the absence of published decisions," she said.
The publication of decisions, in a way which preserved the anonymity of the applicant would lead to greater transparency and consistency of decisions, as well as alerting practitioners to the task entrusted to members of the tribunal , she added.
The Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan SC, told The Irish Times earlier this year that a clear pattern was emerging of the tribunal's failure to make clear, fact-based findings about applicants' credibility, in the context of all the applicant's evidence and available country-of-origin information.
He pointed out that a significant number of judicial review cases were settled without a hearing, meaning that the State had acknowledged the substance of the applicant's claim.
One of the most frequent criticism of the tribunal is inconsistency between its different members in their appeal decisions.
While about one in four appeals from an initial refusal of refugee status is successful, this varies widely from individual member to member.
The tribunal has refused to issue statistics on decisions of individual members. But figures compiled by the Refugee Legal Service has shown that one member, barrister James Nicholson, has heard over 400 appeals, and rejected over 95 per cent of them.
He earned over €300,000 from the tribunal between November 2000 and April 2003, according to a reply to a Dáil question in June 2003.
Asked to comment on the figures, Mr Nicholson referred The Irish Times to the chairman of the tribunal, John Ryan. However, Mr Ryan said he was unable to comment at this time.
On the issue of this perceived discrepancy, Ms McDonagh wrote: "Publication would allow for analysis as to whether any such discrepancies . . . are accounted for by the different mix of cases allocated to members or are due to other factors."
Ms McDonagh also expressed concern about how certain unaccompanied minors in the asylum process are handled.
She pointed out that there were two categories of separated children in the asylum process, those unaccompanied and those accompanied by people other than their parents, either during their journey or claimed on their arrival. She said she had come across cases where children had been placed with "most unsatisfactory persons as guardians".