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Louise Thomas
Editor
United Nations experts have warned Britain is at risk of breaching international law over allegations of child asylum seekers being placed in adult detention centres after crossing the Channel on small boats.
At least 1,300 child refugees who arrived alone in the UK were wrongly identified as adults by border officials in the 18 months from January 2022, with nearly 500 placed in adult detention or unsupervised accommodation, a report by the Refugee Council and other charities found.
The situation was described to The Independent as “a safeguarding crisis on an unprecedented scale”, with January’s report also revealing at least 14 children had been criminalised under new migration laws and held in adult prisons after the Home Office wrongly assessed their ages.
Now five UN special rapporteurs have intervened to highlight their concerns over the report in a letter to the UK government, warning that Home Office age assessment procedures appeared to allow for potential breaches of international law.
Warning that detaining children in adult settings, including at asylum accommodation, is prohibited, the letter states: “The current age determination procedures seem to allow for such a chance, and therefore would place the UK in violation of its responsibilities” under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In the letter, sent in April and made public last month alongside the Home Office’s response, the UN human rights experts urged the previous UK government to take “all necessary interim measures” to “halt the alleged violations and prevent their re-occurrence”.
In its response, the Home Office claimed it was “unable to confirm the statistics” uncovered by the Refugee Council and other charities in January via freedom of information requests to local authorities, because they “cannot be usefully compared” to the department’s own data.
According to the Home Office’s data, nearly half of almost 12,000 cases in which asylum seekers’ ages were officially marked as disputed – and who were therefore provisionally treated as children – were later found to be adults.
But the charities’ figures relate instead to hundreds of children who were given only minimal age assessments at the border – in which two Home Office staff judge that their appearance and demeanour “very strongly suggests they are significantly over 18” – before being detained or housed in adult settings.
Under this procedure, the question over their age is not officially recorded, and they must request a further age assessment themselves from a local authority, which is not informed of their whereabouts, campaigners warn.
In its response to the UN, the former government insisted that reforms in its controversial Nationality and Borders Act sought to make assessments “more consistent and robust” to “ensure that age-appropriate services and care are reserved for genuine children”.
While Rishi Sunak’s government had warned that putting adults in child care settings poses “obvious safeguarding risks”, campaigners argue that the risk of placing a child in adult detention or accommodation is significantly greater than that of placing a young adult in a children’s care setting, where there are naturally more safeguards in place.
Furthermore, under those reforms, a child could have potentially been subject to deportation if they refused to undergo “scientific” age assessment methods explored by the previous government, using MRI and X-ray scanners – which campaigners had warned could amount to obtaining consent for such procedures under duress.
The Children’s Commissioner for England and Wales, Dame Rachel de Souza, warned in April that her office was “deeply concerned” about both the introduction of these age assessment methods, and the “approach to treat children who refuse to consent to these methods as adults”.
Warning that the age assessment process must be “child-centred, age-appropriate and as non-invasive as possible”, Dame Rachel said: “Where a child’s age is disputed and they are awaiting a resolution, they must be treated as vulnerable children first and foremost.”
One 17-year-old boy was quoted by Dame Rachel’s office as saying: “I told them I’m underage but they didn’t believe me and put me with the adults. I didn’t feel safe there because people were drinking, smoking cigarettes and smoking hashish. They are older than myself.”
Labelling the situation “a child safeguarding scandal hiding in plain sight”, Kama Petruczenko, senior policy analyst at the Refugee Council, told The Independent: “It is no surprise that the UN has weighed in to raise serious concerns about children’s welfare and has questioned the UK’s protocols for age determination.
“It is inexplicable that the Home Office does not report on the number of children it has deemed as significantly over 18 and treated as adults, who then had to be rescued from adult settings and taken into care.
“We have had to fill that gap by going to local authorities to get these figures and start to uncover the extent of this crisis.
“The new government must act quickly by resetting Home Office culture and putting child welfare at the heart of policy-making, so that every refugee child who comes to this country is kept safe from harm.”
It is understood that the new home secretary, Yvette Cooper, will now decide on the future of current Home Office policies after a Labour government was elected last week.
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