My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 34, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Dubs and with the welcome support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford and the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger. Worded slightly differently to those tabled in Committee in relation to removals to Rwanda, the amendment would ensure that any unaccompanied child wrongly assessed as an adult could challenge their assessment in domestic courts and tribunals from within the UK and could make that challenge on the basis of the facts and not just the law. In other words, we want to minimise the risk of any unaccompanied child being sent to Rwanda, which the treaty supposedly rules out but acknowledges might happen because they have been wrongly deemed to be an adult. I am grateful to ILPA, the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium and RAMP, of which I am an associate, for their help.
This amendment is about ensuring the best interests of the child, in line with our duties under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as translated into UK immigration law and strongly advocated by the Children’s Commissioner. In Committee, a number of noble Lords detailed the evidence of the significant number of child asylum seekers wrongly assessed as adults, which I will not repeat. However, I note that just last week a study by the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford revealed that child asylum seekers with ongoing age disputes, under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, were arrested, charged and convicted as adults and ended up in adult prisons at serious and obvious risk of harm. This is shocking.
The Minister failed to engage seriously with the evidence presented in Committee of frequent wrongful age assessment and of how the supposed safeguards he has now outlined three times already exist and simply are not working. Instead, he—and in some cases, his colleagues—tried to argue either that the amendment was unnecessary, which I will come to, or that it was harmful because it would act as an incentive to adults to represent themselves as children and would undermine the Bill’s supposed deterrent effect. Well, the deterrent argument was disposed of in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I cited from the impact assessment for the Illegal Migration Bill that
“The academic consensus is that there is little to no evidence”
of immigration policies having a deterrent effect.
The incentive argument ignores the permission stage that was built into the judicial review process to weed out weak, frivolous or unmeritorious claims. Ultimately, if an asylum seeker is found to be an adult, they can then be removed, but first they will have been through a proper, thorough age assessment process involving qualified and experienced social workers as well as due legal process, which allows for consideration of the factual and legal correctness of the age assessment.
That brings me to why this amendment is so necessary. Without it, a child can be sent to Rwanda as an adult on the basis of a short visual assessment by two immigration officers, who are now defined in law as a relevant authority for age assessment purposes. This is despite the Home Office’s own advice that physical appearance and demeanour represent
“a notoriously unreliable basis for assessment of chronological age”.
The much-vaunted scientific methods, prayed in aid in Committee, do not even come into play if the age is decided on the basis of immigration officers’ visual assessment.
It was then argued that there was nothing wrong with a child having to challenge an age assessment from Rwanda. I am sorry, but there is everything wrong with that. It will be difficult for a probably traumatised child to make their case virtually—and it will have to be purely on legal grounds—and to access suitable legal support and representation. During that time, they will be placed in adult accommodation, which could be unsafe. Even if they are successful, there is the unedifying prospect of them being sent back to the UK as objects in a cruel game of pass the parcel. To quote the noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik:
“Surely, flights returning traumatised children to the UK from Rwanda are not an image that the UK Government, the Rwandan Government or the public wish to see”.—[Official Report, 19/2/24; col. 429.]
Such an image would shame us, and we have a duty to safeguard the best interests and welfare of children by ensuring that they are not wrongly sent to Rwanda as adults.
I hope, therefore, that noble Lords from all Benches will support this amendment. I beg to move.
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