Yesterday, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) published two new reports on minimum national legal age requirements focusing on justice and asylum procedures. To highlight the critical issue of the different minimum age requirements across the EU, the Agency has been mapping national legal age requirements in various areas across the EU since 2017.
The reports explore how age limits can affect a child's rights and suggest how Member States can remove inconsistencies to better deliver child protection and improve child participation in judicial and asylum proceedings. The Human Rights Law Centre provided research on the UK for the report on minimum age requirements in justice.
FRA's report on minimum age requirements in justice focuses on children's rights and justice, child participation in judicial proceedings, rights and safeguards in criminal proceedings and detention of children. It shows how age thresholds for children to be heard vary across the EU. Age thresholds can vary not only depending on whether children are witnesses, victims or taken into care; but also depending on family, criminal or asylum law, for example.
The report shows that the UK is the only country where the age at which a child has the right to be heard in divorce and custody cases is not regulated, and where there is no free legal aid available for a child victim. Further, the UK is amongst the four Member States where children accused of committing an offence may be subject to pre-trial detention from the age of 10 (except for Scotland, where the minimum age is 12). In 22 Member States, the age threshold is 14 years old or above.
The report on minimum age in asylum procedures reveals how sometimes only legal representatives, or only the children, need to consent to medically assessing a child's age. When it comes to fingerprinting, some Member States sample below the minimum age laid out in EU law.
The complete dataset can be found on FRA's website, as an accompanying publication to the reports.
Posted on Thursday 26th April 2018