Age Assessments

Benchmarks and Borders: The use of Facial Age Estimation to assess the age of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum Determining whether a young person seeking asylum is a child or an adult is of fundamental importance to their life: it determines whether they receive care from children’s services; can access suitable accommodation and education; safeguarding […]

Age disputes have always been a key area of focus for the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium (RMCC) and, in recent years, members have repeatedly raised concerns about the increasing number of children being denied the support and protection they need because they are being treated as adults. As the Home Office has taken increased […]

Our new report shows that child refugees who come to the UK alone are continuing to face harassment, abuse and criminalisation as a result of being wrongly treated as adults and placed in accommodation with adult strangers.   The report, ‘Lost Childhoods: The consequences of flawed age assessments at the UK border’, revealed that in the […]

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium welcomes aspects of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (BSAIB), particularly the repeal of child detention powers, the Home Office accommodation powers over unaccompanied children, the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024, and other significant portions of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA). While we support the repeal of […]

RMCC members are profoundly concerned by the Illegal Migration Bill which is designed to deny refugees the chance to seek protection. We agree with the UN Refugee Agency that the Bill undermines the very purpose of the Refugee Convention. It risks breaching the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The government has not […]

In this submission to the House of Lords International Agreements Committee inquiry into the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the UK and Rwanda for the provision of an Asylum Partnership Arrangement, the RMCC raises concerns about the possible impact of the proposals on children whose ages have been disputed and the lack of safeguards in […]

The RMCC is appalled by, and entirely opposed to, the government’s plans to permanently remove people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda. We believe the Rwanda scheme to be inhumane and unlawful for many reasons but this short briefing focusses on the possible impact on children. The government plans to send those with ‘inadmissible’ […]

Briefings on the Nationality and Borders Bill, 2021 and 2022   The RMCC provided broad evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights for its legislative scrutiny of the Nationality and Borders Bill but as the Bill made its way through the Lords, the coalition focussed mainly on the part of the Bill that focussed […]