Rwanda Asylum Partnership: Removal of Unaccompanied Children

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I recognise of course that some adults pretend to be children, and therefore there must be some sort of age assessment process. However, listening to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, I was reminded of when I too went to Calais and met Afghan boys. Those looking after them were absolutely satisfied that the half-dozen I met were all under 18, and mostly around 16. They all had moustaches, and one boy had an incipient beard. Anyone looking at them would say to themselves, “Well, I wonder, aren’t they bound to be over 18?” The fact is that those young men who had come from Afghanistan, fleeing the Taliban and the prospect of having to join the Taliban, were undoubtedly underage, but they mature very much more quickly than western Europeans. That is, to a great extent, an answer to part of what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said.

Looking at the Nationality and Borders Act, what really worries me is its wording: what sort of training would a “designated person” have? Under Section 52, it appears that they will have to use “scientific methods in age assessments”, and I wonder what sort of scientific methods those will be. The Act sets out some of the ways, but what are the people who will apply them be able to do, and how are they really going to show that a young man or girl—it is generally a young man—is in fact under 18? As has been said again and again by other noble Lords today and during the passing of the Nationality and Borders Bill, this is a really serious matter.

A number of very sensible amendments were put forward—not by me, but I supported them—in Committee and on Report of the Nationality and Borders Bill. None of them, as your Lordships’ House will remember, were accepted in the Commons by the Government, and none of them were agreed. As others said earlier, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Lister, there is a real danger that, for those young men aged 16 and 17, what they have gone through before will not be made any easier but in many ways will be made worse by what this Government are putting them through.