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should resolve this difficulty.
The Guidance states that unaccompanied or
separated children should be accompanied by an
appropriate adult. 5 According to guidance to Immigration
Judges 6 by the Asylum and Immigration
Tribunal 7 an appeal cannot proceed unless a social
worker is present. In practice, as mentioned earlier
in the Guardianship section, children are often not
taken to an appeal hearing by their allocated social
worker or foster carer.
13.2 Determining the Appeal
From April 2004, adjudicators have been
advised to create more child friendly
environments by sitting around a table
or moving to their chambers to hear an appeal
from an unaccompanied child. 8 They are also
advised to consider whether it is appropriate for an
unaccompanied or separated child to give evidence
or be cross-examined, taking into account their age,
maturity, capacity, or cultural differences and any
expert evidence of the child’s mental or physical
condition. In practice the determinations analyzed
for this research suggest that adjudicators have
not altered the way they conduct appeals to take
children’s needs into account. It is also clear that
even if appeal hearings themselves become more
child friendly, 9 the majority of adjudicators did not
adopt a child centred framework when arriving at
a decision. Nor did they take into account the advice
they had been given that the younger the unaccompanied
or separated child the less likely they were to
have full information about the reasons for leaving
their country of origin or the arrangements made
for their travel. 10 Equally decision makers regularly
fail to take into account variations in the reliability
of oral versus expert or documentary evidence
that reflect the maturity of the unaccompanied or
separated child. 11 Children are routinely denied
the benefit of the doubt. 12 Not only is this in breach
of the Chief Adjudicator’s Guidance, it also fails to
comply with the Immigration Rules 13 themselves
according to which account must be taken of the
child’s maturity with more weight given to objective
indications of risk than to the child’s state of mind
and understanding of the situation. Moreover,
according to the Immigration Rules, an asylum
application on behalf of a child should not be
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