UK targets scientific ways to determine asylum seekers' age

BRITAIN will seek to stop adults posing as children when claiming asylum by drawing up new scientific assessments to help determine an applicant's age, the government said. 

Adults were found to be posing as children in two-thirds of claims disputed on the basis of age, the government said citing data from 1,696 cases in the year to September 2021.

"The practice of single grown adult men, masquerading as children claiming asylum is an appalling abuse of our system which we will end," home secretary Priti Patel said in a statement.

A new committee will look at a range of scientific methods for determining age and assess their accuracy and reliability as well as considering medical and ethical issues.

Their findings will ultimately feed into a system for assessing asylum seekers’ ages, as set out in legislation going through Parliament, reported MailOnline.

The government said new checks would bring it into line with other European states which use x-ray and other medical scans to help assess a person's age.

Patel said the deception carried out by some asylum seekers is an ‘appalling abuse of our system, which we will end’.

• According to the report, one of the most troubling examples of an asylum seeker pretending to be a child wasParsons Green terrorist Ahmed Hassan.
• He posed as a 16-year-old before setting off a bomb on a Tube train in west London in 2017, injuring 23 people.
• His real age remains unknown, but the judge who jailed the Iraqi for 34 years in 2018 said he was satisfied the bomber was between 18 and 21.

"The practice of single grown adult men masquerading as children claiming asylum is an appalling abuse of our system, which we will end. By posing as children, these adult men go on to access children’s services and schools through deception and deceit – putting children and young adults in school and care at risk... I have given more resources and support to local councils to ensure that they apply vigorous and robust tests to check the ages of migrants to stop adult men being automatically classified as children," Patel was quoted as saying by MailOnline.

A Home Office probe in 2018 found an adult asylum seeker spent six weeks as a Year 11 pupil at Stoke High School in Ipswich.

Currently, they are given the benefit of the doubt if they appear to be under 25.

A Home Office spokesman said European countries use X-rays, and sometimes CT scans and MRI imaging, as part of their age-assessment procedures. Finland and Norway use radiography to examine the development of teeth and the fusion of bones in the wrist, he said.

France uses X-rays to assess the fusion of the collar bone, as well as dental and wrist X-rays. And Greece also deploys dental X-rays alongside social worker checks.

According to the Home Office, resolving age disputes is ‘currently very time-consuming, challenging and expensive for local authorities and the Government’.

Disagreements can lead to legal challenges which can cost councils hundreds of thousands of pounds and take as long as three years to resolve, the spokesman added. Each lone child migrant looked after by a local authority costs the taxpayer £46,000 a year.

Under the Bill, the home secretary will be able to specify which types of age assessments can be used, including medical imaging technology and swabs for DNA analysis, for example.

Asylum seekers will have to consent to the tests, the legislation says. But failure to co-operate may lead to ‘damage to the person’s credibility, it added.