Asylum & RefugeeJun 19, 2026·3 min read·🔥 High relevance

The UK’s Discriminatory AI Experiment on Child Refugees

Human Rights Watch – News

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The UK’s Discriminatory AI Experiment on Child Refugees

Summary

The UK Home Office is pushing ahead with plans to use AI technology to guess the age of young people arriving at UK borders to seek asylum, starting in 2027. Yet the Home Office’s own tests found the technology performed worse on certain groups of people , notably Africans. The plans severely endanger the human rights of children seeking asylum and should be scrapped. Facial age estimation technology (FAE) is a nascent technology used to estimate a person’s age, which would contribute towards determining their asylum status. Described with much fanfare by the Home Office as a “cutting-edge AI tech,” FAE is currently used in UK shops and bars on customers seeking to buy age-restricted items. To use this for life-changing decisions in refugee processing centers is to introduce an unreliable, untested technology into an already flawed process . Human Rights Watch, Foxglove , and sixty other civil society groups have written to the Home Office asking them to halt these plans immediately as they create new, unnecessary risks to vulnerable young people. This technology has no place in deciding whether a young person can access the rights and protections they are entitled to. The Home Office’s troubling justification for using this technology wrongly pitches FAE as a magical solution to complex issues and as a way increase deportations, while painting asylum seekers as fraudulent. The UK is influential in setting migration policy, for example, the now-shelved Rwanda Scheme , since mimicked by Dutch and US governments .

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Click to expand Image Migrants walk towards a bus to be taken for processing after disembarking from a Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) lifeboat on a beach after crossing the English Channel, in Dungeness, England, on June 15, 2022. © 2022 Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images The UK Home Office is pushing ahead with plans to use AI technology to guess the age of young people arriving at UK borders to seek asylum, starting in 2027. Yet the Home Office’s own tests found the technology performed worse on certain groups of people, notably Africans. The plans severely endanger the human rights of children seeking asylum and should be scrapped. Facial age estimation technology (FAE) is a nascent technology used to estimate a person’s age, which would contribute towards determining their asylum status. Described with much fanfare by the Home Office as a “cutting-edge AI tech,” FAE is currently used in UK shops and bars on customers seeking to buy age-restricted items. To use this for l

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World Refugee Day 2026 in numbers: UNHCR reports decline in global refugee numbers amid escalating crisis

Subscribed with another email? A French Red Cross volunteer welcomes refugees coming from Saint-Nazaire in January 1945 in Nantes, during the Second World War. | Photo Credit: AFP In 1951, when the Refugee Convention was adopted, the focus of the signatory governments was on rebuilding a fragile European continent. It thus went on limit the definition of a refugee to those displaced by the “events occurring in Europe before 1951”. The 1951 Refugee Convention will complete 75 years, this year. On World Refugee Day 2026, have a look at the trends that are shaping the current crisis: As per UNHCR’s G lobal Compact on Refugees 2025, and the agency’s latest G lobal Trends report, the growth in the number of refugees has slowed down since 2022, and has in fact stabilised. A Rohingya refugee looks on at a roadside market inside a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on April 17, 2026. | Photo Credit: Reuters The decline in the number of refugees cannot be understood in isolation as a positive indicator. A Sudanese refugee father from Al-Fashir rides on a motorized cart with his family travelling between Chad and Sudan amid the ongoing conflict between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army, at the Tine border post in eastern Chad, on November 22, 2025. | Photo Credit: Reuters The UNHCR in 2025 also reported about 4.5 million ‘stateless’ people, with Rohingyas forming the largest group among them. A family shelters in a tent mounted on a car in a field in the desert countryside of Deir al-Zor, Syria, on May 8, 2026. | Photo Credit: Reuters In its report, the UNHCR also pointed to the fact that while children make up only about 29% of the world population, the add up to about 39% of the refugee population. A migrant carries a child as she along with others continue their journey to the U.S. border, in Acandi, Colombia, on July 9, 2023. | Photo Credit: Reuters Low and middle-income countries end up hosting a bulk (68%) of the refugees, despite having a significantly less share of the global GDP. Afghan refugee children play next to trucks loaded with their family's belongings as they wait to return Afghanistan along a highway in Landi Kotal, Pakistan, on April 9, 2025. | Photo Credit: AP About 4.4 million such people returned back to their countries of origin, thereby removing their refugee status.

The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Age verification is consuming the Internet . Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are —to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers. The investigation also found that the Home Office, which oversees UK immigration and policing, disbanded a scientific committee designed to advise it on broader age estimation methods while it was exploring the introduction of AI. “We were keen to highlight the inadequacies of facial age estimation, but this opportunity was not presented to us, and then the committee was shut down,” says Tim Cole, an emeritus professor of medical statistics at University College London’s Institute of Child Health and former committee member. The spokesperson adds that the committee was disbanded due to requiring “different fields of expertise.” While the Home Office says face scanning is designed to be an “additional” tool for border officers and won’t “replace or overrule human judgment,” it did not answer questions about how it plans to use the technology in real-world environments. “In cases of uncertainty,” the spokesperson says, “individuals will always be treated as children until a further assessment is conducted.” The UK government first announced its plans to use face age estimation alongside border staff judgments to assess migrants in July 2025. Tens of thousands of people make asylum claims in the UK each year, with many arriving in the country after dangerous , physically demanding journeys in small boats crossing the English Channel. Currently, border staff who doubt the age of someone claiming to be under 18 can assess their physical appearance, answers to interview questions, and general demeanor, to make an initial decision about their age. The Home Office has indicated that FAE technology would help immigration officers who are making age assessments while working at the point of first encounter. The photo quality was apparently so bad that the report was unable to determine if that or the physical condition of asylum seekers at arrival had more of an impact on the algorithms’ age estimation results. The internal report concluded that more needed to be done to study the impacts of stress that asylum seekers endure before arriving at their destination. “Children seeking asylum have often suffered unimaginable trauma,” says Martha Dark, the co-executive director of rights group Foxglove.

The UK’s Discriminatory AI Experiment on Child Refugees

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