The Home Office has ruled out dental x-ray checks to verify the age of Calais refugees arriving in Britain, criticising them as “inaccurate, inappropriate and unethical”.
The official rejection of the demand from Conservative backbenchers was welcomed by the British Dental Association, which had earlier condemned the proposal as inappropriate and inaccurate.
“We do not use dental x-rays to confirm the ages of those seeking asylum in the UK,” said a Home Office spokesperson.
“We work closely with the French authorities and their partner agencies to ensure all those who come to the UK from the camps in Calais are eligible under the Dublin regulations.
“All individuals are referred to the UK authorities by the France Terre d’Asile [charity] and are then interviewed by French and UK officials. Where credible and clear documentary evidence of age is not available, criteria including physical appearance and demeanour are used as part of the interview process to assess age.”
Home Office officials say that once refugee children have arrived in Britain they are fingerprinted as part of further identity checks. There is also the option of requesting a further local authority age assessment, which must be case law-compliant and approved by two social workers.
David Davies, chairman of the Commons Welsh affairs select committee, had said dental checks or hand x-rays to check bone density should be used to check ages and stop Britain’s hospitality being abused.
He said: “People in Britain want to help children but we don’t want to be taken for a free ride either, by people who seem to have got to the front of the queue even though they clearly look in some cases a lot older than 18.”
The British Dental Association had told the Home Office that it was “vigorously opposed” to the use of dental x-rays to determine the age of asylum seekers and asked for the privacy of “these vulnerable young people” to be respected by the media.
“It’s not only an inaccurate method for assessing age, but it is inappropriate and unethical to take radiographs of people when there is no health benefit for them. X-rays taken for a clinically justified reason must not be used for another purpose without the patient’s informed consent, without coercion and in full knowledge of how the radiograph will be used and by whom.”
On Wednesday several UK newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Sun questioned the age of the some of the 14 migrants who were bussed into London from Calais as part of an unaccompanied children’s resettlement programme.
They used pictures of seven of them who looked like older teenagers and pointed out that one had the features of a 38-year-old, according to computer facial recognition software.
It has transpired that seven of the remaining children were younger and officials had asked photographers not to take pictures of them.
“To their credit all the media accepted the request and put down their cameras. That’s why you don’t see the pictures of the children, some of whom we believe may be as young as 12 or 13, in the papers today,” said Father Michael Scanlon, a local priest, who was there at the time.
Under voluntary press guidelines no child under 16 can be photographed or interviewed without the consent of a parent or guardian.
George Gabriel of Citizens UK, which has been working in the Calais camp for more than a year on the transfer of child refugees to Britain under its Safe Passage programme, said that one of the photographs of “overage” refugees that appeared on the front pages of British newspapers on Wednesday might in fact be a translator.
He said: “The reason they look so old is they have been waiting in the Calais ‘Jungle’ for over a year to reach their loved ones in Britain,” he said. Gabriel added that there were 43 young girls who were lone unaccompanied refugees eligible to be brought to Britain under the Dubs amendment but to date nobody had come to the UK under this provision.
Unicef said the official census of the camp now shows there are about 1,300 unaccompanied children in total, and there are 500 children who claim to have family in the UK. “We’ve seen a few reports quoting older numbers but these come from the official census,” said a Unicef UK spokesman.
Jonathan Clark, the bishop of Croydon and Citizens UK leader, explained: “Extensive checks are carried out on the children Safe Passage UK works with while they are still in Calais to verify that they are under 18; this is an extremely rigorous process and our lawyers spend 10 hours just on verification for each case. In addition, the Home Office carries out their own checks before children are brought to the UK. The average age of Safe Passage’s clients is 16 and the youngest unaccompanied minor in Calais to be reunited with family in Britain was a nine-year-old girl.
“The children we work with have experienced massive trauma, fleeing their homes and living for months in dangerous conditions in Calais. Those who have experienced such hardship often look older than their years.”