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Rwanda deportations: Home Office at risk of accidentally deporting children [1]

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Date: 2023-11

Children could be deported to Rwanda as the Home Office has incorrectly classed more than 1,000 asylum seeking minors as adults, human rights groups have warned today.

Unaccompanied children arriving on small boats at the UK border are briefly interviewed before being funnelled through the Home Office system labelled as adults, said Maddie Harris, founder of Humans for Rights Network.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a child ends up on that Rwanda flight,” Harris told openDemocracy, saying she receives daily distressed calls from children at the border who have been labelled as adults.

Some children have even received notices of intent that could lead them to being forcibly deported to Rwanda, according to Steve Smith, CEO of refugee charity Care4Calais.

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Human rights groups say similar warnings a year ago were ignored, with no improvement to flawed age assessments that have been accused of racist generalisations about children’s expected appearance.

The UK government’s controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was first scheduled for June 2022 but was grounded after legal challenges. Officials say it is now planned for late February if the Home Office wins its fight in the Supreme Court – with a decision expected before Christmas.

Sakina*, 16, arrived in the UK at the beginning of October on a small boat and was asked to state her age in Dover at the Western Jetfoil processing centre. During a ten-minute Home Office interview, she reports being told: “If you change your story, say that you were lying and that you are over 18 – then you’ll get to leave.”

Moments later, she alleges that the woman interviewing her said: “I can guess how old you are. You’re 22.”

When Sakina again stated her age as 16, she says that the interviewer told her: “You arrived here on a small boat so you must know what you’re doing. Therefore, you must be an adult.” Sakina was then sent to stay in a hotel with adult men and women.

Humans for Rights Network referred Sakina’s case to her local council, which has agreed to conduct a “full” age assessment, but the group is still concerned because she has to stay in the hotel for the duration of the process.

“It means she remains in a potentially dangerous situation,” Harris added. “It’s not safe for kids to be with adults, in places where people are experiencing all kinds of mental health issues.”

Meanwhile, Isaias* was on the same small boat as an Eritrean woman who was found washed up dead on a beach in France at the end of September. The death onboard sparked an investigation and meant he didn’t get an interview but rather was sent straight to a hotel to share a room with an adult, Harris said.

Isaias describes feeling “depressed and distressed” as he waits to hear back from the local authority children’s services.

Omar*, 15, said his comprehensive set of digitalised documents from Iraq, including his birth certificate and ID card, were rejected. He claims Home Office staff said: “We don’t care. No photos are accepted here,” while laughing at his name on his documents.

Omar’s family has since sent over his physical documents via post. He’s described feeling “unsafe” sharing a room in a hotel with an unrelated adult for 25 days while waiting to be moved.

Humans for Rights Network says it has worked with more than 1,000 children wrongly accused of being adults in just over 12 months. “We’ve documented all kinds of things: ‘you’re too tall’, ‘your hands are too big’, ‘your face is too hairy’, ‘you can’t possibly be a child’,” Harris told us. She called the process “inherently racist and based on Western assumptions” about what a minor should know, look like, or have experienced, or what documents they should possess.

Care4Calais has likewise worked with more than 1,200 refugees whose age has been disputed, with many cases being challenged solely on the basis of an initial assessment by an individual member of staff at an arrival processing centre.

“We see many of these initial decisions overturned, with the refugee’s correct age later being accepted,” Smith said, adding: “Sadly, by that point, they may already have gone through the trauma of being inappropriately accommodated and being denied their education.”

Some 94% of Home Office initial age-disputed decisions were incorrect in 2021, according to a Refugee Council study of its cases that year.

A separate study earlier this year by the Helen Bamber Foundation, Asylum Aid and Humans for Rights Network found that, of 1,300 age-disputed cases referred to local authority children’s services, two-thirds were later found to be children that had been put into the adult asylum system with no support or protection.

A Home Office spokesperson told us: “There are clear safeguarding issues which arise if a child is inadvertently treated as an adult, and equally if an adult is wrongly accepted as a child and placed in accommodation with younger children to whom they could present a risk.

“We are strengthening the age assessment process to make it more consistent and robust including through the introduction of the National Age Assessment Board, introducing scientific assessments, such as X-rays.”

* Names have been changed

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/rwanda-deportations-flight-home-office-care-4-calais-humans-for-rights-network/

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