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Chapter 1 | Introduction
The U.K. has yet to follow the guidance provided
by the Committee on the Rights of the Child in
its General Comment No. 6 (2005). This states:
indicate that a greater percentage of unaccompanied
or separated children than adults arrive from certain
countries of origin. These data should prompt analysis
and have an impact on policy. The Immigration
and Nationality Directorate’s own Country Information
and Policy Unit should ask why more children
than adults are fleeing from particular countries, by
expanding its sources of information to include such
bodies as the Committee on the Rights of the Child,
Anti-Slavery International, and UNICEF. Instead its
information deficit failure leads decision makers to
be unaware of practices or events which are the basis
for the fear being expressed by many unaccompanied
or separated child asylum seekers.
In addition to these evidentiary problems, our
research revealed a fundamental legal issue:
many immigration officers and case workers
simply did not accept that child trafficking or
the forcible recruitment of child soldiers can
give rise to a right to international protection
under the Refugee Convention.
When assessing refugee claims of unaccompanied or
separated children, States shall take into account the
development of, and formative relationships between
international human rights and refugee law.... In
particular, the refugee definition of the 1951 Refugee
Convention must be interpreted in an age and gendersensitive
manner, taking into account the particular
motives for, and forms and manifestations of, persecution
experienced by children. Persecution of kin; under-age
recruitment; trafficking of children for prostitution;
and sexual exploitation or subjection to female genital
mutilation, are some of the child-specific forms and
manifestations of persecution which may justify the
granting of refugee status if such acts are related to
one of the 1951 Refugee Convention grounds.
The U.K. authorities’ failure to create and develop
an appropriate legal framework may be attributable
to two factors. The first is the “culture of disbelief”
shared by all levels of decision makers in relation to
asylum seekers, particularly — it would appear —
unaccompanied or separated children who apply
for asylum. The second is the Government’s characterization
of asylum seekers as a “problem” to be
dealt with by seeking ways to minimize the flow of
applicants rather than as a group of particularly
vulnerable migrants.
The “culture of disbelief” has a number of different
facets, some of which are interlinked. There
is firstly a widely held assumption that children are
appendages of adults who do not attract persecution
in their own right. An unaccompanied or separated
child who applies for asylum is thus presumed to
have done so at the instigation of an adult, to gain
preferment rather than because of a real need for
protection. Our research revealed that decision mak-
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