NA, R (on the application of) v London Borough of Croydon

This is an application for judicial review of decisions of the defendant, the London Borough of Croydon, dated 12 December 2008 and 15 June 2009. Both decisions concluded that the claimant was not the age he claimed to be, which was 15 with a date of birth in November 1993, but rather he was 17 and was given an assigned date of birth of November 1991.

The claimant is an Afghan national who arrived in this country as an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum. He had with him an identity document that will be further considered in this judgment. It appears that the original of the document was provided to the Home Office and its whereabouts now are uncertain. The Home Office referred him to the defendant Council for assessment and support as he appeared to be older than 15, although it was accepted that he was under the age of 18.

On referral the claimant presented the defendant with a good photocopy of the original document without an English translation. On 1 December 2008, he was interviewed by two social workers, Dorianne Sultana and Lurine Henry, who acted under the supervision of their manager, Albertha Golding, who may have played some superficial part in the process on that day. All are social workers and, by reason of their employment with the London Borough of Croydon, the court will assume that they are experienced in age assessment and have substantial experience. It is a matter of judicial knowledge that the borough contains the Home Office Asylum Reception Unit, and it conducts large numbers of age assessments year in year out.

At the conclusion of that interview the Management Decision Sheet recorded the following:

On 9 December the identity document was translated into English. That translation reveals that it is stated to be a document of value dated 16/2/1386 that the court has been informed is the Afghan Islamic calendar date corresponding to 6 May 2007 in the Gregorian calendar used in Europe. It is apparently signed in three places by the responsible clerk, the Chairman, and the owner of the document, and bears a fingerprint of someone. It is stated to have been issued by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Home Office Registration Ministry in the province of language Nangarhar and has a reference number. Under the heading "Place of birth and age" the translation of the Afghan reads as follows:

The real difficulties of anybody making age assessment on children between the ages of 15 and 17, particularly where there are children who are foreign nationals with different cultural histories and who may have experienced traumatic events in their lives, are well set out in the consistent learning of this court and the Court of Appeal. For present purposes they are summarised in the judgment of Collins J in the case of A v London Borough of Croydon and Others [2009] EWHC 939. That case itself arose as the second part of a judicial review. The first part of which resulted in a case going to the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal dealt with certain submissions as to how age assessments should be challenged in this court and made other pertinent observations of relevance to any court deciding this issue in a judgment given on 18 December 2008 [2008] EWCA Civ 1445. Because there are now a number of different decisions with the same name I shall refer to the decision of Collins J as A v Croydon No. 2 for the purposes of this judgment.

Mr Justice Collins sets out at paragraphs 8 to 22 the learning derived from previous decisions of this court, including the decision of Stanley Burnton J in Merton. He cites the guidance of the Royal College of Paediatricians and the views of the expert report of Dr Heaven Crawley “Working with Children and Young People” published by ILPA. None of this needs to be repeated in this judgment and I adopt his remarks made with gratitude. Unlike A No 2 the present case is not concerned with the vexed sub-issue of how far, if at all, assessment by paediatricians can make a useful contribution to the age assessment process, and I say nothing at all on that topic.

At paragraphs [38] to [45] of his judgment Collins J, having reached the conclusion that paediatric assessment was unlikely in the general run of cases to be of much assistance, stressed, however, the assessment must be made by trained social workers applying the Merton guidance and providing procedural fairness. At [43] he noted that Croydon’s procedures to ensure fairness included the putative child being informed that he had a right to an independent adult to be present at the interview. In the following paragraph [44] he states:

“I recognise that the effect on a child being assessed to be an adult will be serious. It is essential that assessment are made by experienced and trained social workers and that all the safeguards to ensure fairness are in place. The system at present is undoubtedly far from perfect”

(emphasis supplied)

It will be necessary to consider in this judgment how far the London Borough of Croydon complied with the practices that they told Collins J they applied in the determination of age assessment, and from which I conclude that at paragraph 44 of his judgment Collins J concluded it was important that Croydon and other social worker authorities making age assessments did apply in the particular case.

Returning then to the December 2008 age assessment, the social workers expressed their conclusions in the following terms:

If matters had rested there, in my judgment such a conclusion would have been very difficult to sustain in a judicial review applying the fair standards identified by the courts in age assessment cases, as summarised by Collins J in A v Croydon No 2. I can summarise these reasons briefly. Whilst I accepty that the identity document was not conclusive in his favour, there was a material failure to understand its nature, authenticity, and the assistance it provided to the claimant in a case of admitted doubt.

I make the following observations. First the document was not a birth certificate but an identity document. The important difference between the two is explained by the Home Office Country Guidance relating to Afghanistan, with which Croydon are familiar as they successfully relied upon it and referred to it in their decision in A v Croydon No 2 itself, the Country of Origin Information Report (COIR) Afghanistan, dated 18 February 2009. At paragraph 33.05 under the heading "Identity Cards" the relevant provisions of the Afghan civil code are cited. Then in the following paragraph there is a quotation from the Research Directorate, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, in December 2007, which says in the following terms:

Further information from COIR report reveals in the following paragraph that there had been a change of practice from a 20 page identity document known as the full taskera, and replacing it in about 1990 to 1992 with a shorter document which is called a taskera certificate, which is only one page and, includes some minimal essential information. By contrast paragraph 33.08 under the heading "Documents registration, births and marriages" the point is made that birth certificates are very rare in Afghanistan, certainly outside maternity hospitals in Kabul. Official statistics state that less than one per cent of the population has birth certificates.

It is of some relevance that in the particular case that Collins J was considering it was that the claimant relied upon a birth certificate, even though the in-country guidance suggested it was statistically highly unlikely that he had to be properly issued with one.

Second, in my judgment the error in failing to contra-distinguish between birth certificates and identify documents fundamentally invaded the probative worth of the document upon which the claimant was relying in this case; because it was an identity certificate it did not purport to record birth contemporaneously and can hardly be dismissed as to its authenticity for that reason. However, if the document was issued when the translation stated it was, it was issued about a year before he left Afghanistan and before any claim to asylum or protection as an unaccompanied child asylum seeker had arisen. Moreover, the document on its face was, internally referring back to documents held apparently in 2003, long before any occasion to leave Afghanistan or claim asylum was risen and indicated that the claimant was then aged nine.

Third, if the nature of the document had been understood, then it would indeed have suggested that the claimant was 13 when the photograph that was attached to the document, and appended to it, was taken. This may well be older than the age he claimed he was when it was taken, but it would nevertheless give consistency with the age claimed by the claimant in supporting the consistency in the identity document itself that appeared to have been issued by the competent authority in Afghanistan.

Fourth, although the age assessment indicates in the words quoted that the social workers did not find the document to be authentic, when solicitors became involved in this case a Part 18 request for further information was made. In the answers to that Part 18 request it is said that that was an error and that there was no intention to make any judgment or assessment on the authenticity of the document as the social workers had no training in that issue, and all that was intended to be said was that it needed translation. It is a little difficult to simply correct the report by substituting translation for authentication, as suggested in the Part 18 report, although the court takes the point that it is now said that no criticism of the document was intended in the sense that it was not intended to go behind what the document purported to be.

Fifth, if no doubt was intended to be thrown on the authenticity of the document, ie what it purported to be, on 12 December 2008, in my judgment it is very difficult to see how the social workers applying the cautious approach required by the assessment process, and giving the benefit of doubt to the child claimant in the case of doubt, could have reached the conclusion that he was 17. There was doubt at the time of the initial interview causing a decision to be deferred. It was recognised that the document was an important document not merely in the form, but in the fact that the matter was put over from 1 December to 12 December for a translation to assist in the process. When the document was translated it substantially supported the claimant's claimed age and there was nothing unusual or suspicious about it on its face: the fact that it was in existence at all, its form, its content, or what it appeared to be saying. Apart from the one inconsistency in the earlier assessment as to the date of the elbow injury, upon which no emphasis appeared to have been placed in the December assessment, the social, educational and medical histories were all consistent with each other and with the identity document as to the age and the claimed age. Nothing else emerged to undermine the claimant’s age as claimed.

It is common ground, and clear throughout all the materials and the authorities on this topic, that physical appearance alone is a notoriously unreliable basis for assessment of chronological age. The extensive literature and guidance on the subject says so. Indeed anyone with ordinary non-expert knowledge of young people whether as a parent or otherwise, knows how difficult it is to make such assessment from appearances alone. In any event, submits the claimant, it was accepted that the claimant looked young.

What apparently counted against him in the December assessment was his demeanour, as assessed in interview, his response to the interpreter, which he was told not to do, and that was indicating some assertive behaviour and some doubt about the narrative of his travel from Afghanistan to the United Kingdom: a journey that he undertook with the benefit of an agent. That is, on any view, somewhat fragile material to weigh conclusively in the balance against the age claimed either at all, or to the degree in which the balance did weigh against this defendant in the conclusion that he was not 15, but 17.

Therefore, if the December decision had stood alone it would, on the conventional judicial review principles, have been quashed (1) because it was based upon a failure to take into account material factors arising from an identity document; (2) it took into account immaterial factors arriving from errors and understanding what the document said; and (3) on the material that is contained in that assessment alone, in my judgment it was a decision that no reasonable social worker properly directing themselves as to relevant test and material could have arrived at. On the balance of factors for and against the conclusion on age, a conclusion that he was 17 was simply not one reasonably open on this material, even if the view was taken that the Afghan authorities may have erred in 2003 in identifying his age as nine then. Mr Buttler, who appears for the claimant, accepted that the position might well have been different if an assigned age of 16 had been given, a little older than the claimed age, but not two years older in all the circumstances.

However, the December 2008 decision was not the last word on this matter. The court must now revert to the sequence of events. Having obtained the information, including the Merton Age Assessment form in March earlier, on 23 March the claimant amended his grounds. On 28 April permission was granted to judicially review the decision of the defendants, notwithstanding that an acknowledgment of service had been put in defending that decision and submitting that there were no grounds to interfere with it.

On 28 May 2009, there was a skeleton argument served and on 1 June 2009 witness statements were served responding to the information revealed in the Social Services file, and the age assessment that had been disclosed earlier. So the claimant therefore had amended his case from asserting that there was a procedural failure by failing to give reasons at all, to challenging the particular reasons disclosed, to which reference had already been made.

At about the same time that all this was done in June, the claimant served a witness statement from an interpreter, that amongst other things, refers to the identity document and states that there were various errors in the translation obtained by the London Borough of Croydon. The only error that is material for the purpose of this judgment is that it is said that the date on which the document was issued was wrong. The claimant's version in the bundle before me has in that part of the document "error in translation 16/2/1386" crossed out and "16/2/1383" inserted. The court has been informed that by the use of an internet calculator that would give a Gregorian calendar date of 5 May 2004. That is to say that if the revised translation is right, the date that the document has been issued has been pushed back to a date when the claimant would have been about ten, again separating it from the events which may have caused his journey to the United Kingdom and making the date between the documents that showed that he was nine in 2003, and the issue of the document in 2004, a much shorter gap. That would be relevant to the age that he would have been on the photograph attached to the document.

There was no revised acknowledgment of service or evidence served by the defendant in response to the advised grounds. This application was due to be heard on 17 June 2007 by Mr Goudie QC, sitting as a Deputy Judge of this court. The night before the hearing, however, the claimant was served with a further age assessment, apparently completed on 15 June 2009 and based upon an interview that the claimant's solicitors knew nothing about what had been undertaken between social workers and the claimant on 9 April 2009. There was clearly some discussion before the learned Deputy Judge as to the appropriate course to be taken and the outcome was that the case was adjourned with the defendant having to pay the costs thrown away. The defendant was directed to file grounds of defence within 14 days of any amended grounds to be served by the claimant. The claim form was amended for a second time in July 2009 and the claimant served further evidence, but again no evidence was served by, or on behalf of, the defendant and no detailed grounds were filed in response to the case as now amended.

The case was then due to be heard in August, but the defendant applied to break the fixture because counsel of choice, who had settled the skeleton argument, was unavailable. The case then came into the list before me on 17 September in the event that that counsel was still not available, but the court has been ably assisted by Mr McGuire, who has made pertinent submissions upon the case, which lost none of their force because of the economy and moderation with which they were presented.

In the event four questions have been argued before me as issues to be resolved in this application:

I reject the claimant's submission that the court should review the June 2009 decision with a particularly intense or anxious scrutiny, as such an approach appears to me to be inconsistent with the principles that emerge from the decided case law on the question, particularly A v Croydon in the Court of Appeal. Life and limb is not put in jeopardy by a flawed age assessment and the courts have not recognised that an age assessment interferes with the core of human right.

Further, the cases of B v Merton and A v Croydon No 1 and A v Croydon No 2 all emphasise the decision in question is that of the experienced social workers who have the knowledge to form these assessments, and the experience of interacting with young people from abroad not available to the court. Further, as a matter both of strategy construction as to who was intended by Parliament to make the decision, and the practical realities of the difficult task of how such assessments should be conducted that arise frequently day in and day out, as the numbers of unaccompanied asylum seeking children has risen over the years, all indicate that these are questions for social workers, subject, of course, to judicial review.

More than one reference emerges in the case law warning the court against over judicialisation of the process, and from trespassing from the proper province of supervising how the decision was reached into something closer to making a decision on the merits itself. It has been stated on a number of occasions that the principles of judicial review represent the appropriate mechanism for supervision of the decision for compliance of all the relevant requirements of the law. I accept, however, that those principles permit an appropriate degree of scrutiny according to the subject matter, the circumstances, and the consequences of the decision, even where the heightened approach of anxious scrutiny is not required. The direct and immediate consequences of this decision are not as severe as they would have been if the claimant was being rejected altogether as a minor.

It is to be observed the Home Office, following the assessment by Croydon, granted him discretionary leave to remain as a minor from Afghanistan and an application for an extension of that permission that leave to remain is presently outstanding. He is being accommodated and supported by Croydon as a child under section 20 of the Children Act and other material duties that are owed to him in the light of his assessed age are being provided. He therefore does not face imminent detention, removal or homelessness as an adult.

Nevertheless, if the present assessment is undisturbed by this court he will be treated as an adult in two months time when all of these consequences may occur. It is submitted that if they occur to someone who has not in fact reached the age of 18, he will be caused in a general sense harm inconsistent with the principles of the Children Act, the Home Office policies applicable to unaccompanied children, and also the international obligations that this country owes pursuant to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In the case of A v Croydon No 1 in the Court of Appeal, Ward LJ, giving the principal judgment in that case, considered whether a precedent fact approach to age- assessment was required because there was a human right engaged under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. He said this:

Although that case has recently gone to the House of Lords on appeal, I understand from counsel that that part of the judgment is not challenged and it has not been suggested by Mr Buttler, appearing for the claimant before me, that Article 8 requires a particular form of scrutiny in this case.

It is of course right that determination of age as a part of an assessment of whether a housing duty is owed is not, as a matter of law, an in rem adjudication on the status for all purposes. In the present case, in fact, the dispute is not essentially about whether duties are owed as a minor at all because he has been assessed to be under 18. However, I do observe that in the light of the developments in the case law, and particularly the observations and conclusions reached by Collins J in A v Croydon No 2 when he explained why in his judgment paediatric evidence will not generally be likely to succeed in challenging the local authority assessments, it is unlikely that a social worker assessment, that is undisturbed by the court, will not have significant impact in other aspects of the person's social life. If the social workers, for example, have considered the one thing that an asylum seeking child may rely upon in support if he has such a thing, namely an identity document apparently issued by the government of which he was a national and consider that that does not indicate reliably the age of the child, there is very little other forms of material that the claimed child will be able to put to either the social worker, the Home Office or anybody else to challenge that age assessment.

Other agencies of the state are unlikely to have the same experience of age assessment as social workers who are trained in the necessary techniques and have substantial experience in applying them. As a matter of practice, therefore, although not of law, a social worker assessment of the precise age of a child may well prove to be the decisive assessment on which other agencies of the state and private persons do, and are entitled to, rely in performing their duties. I observe that the following aspects of social life at least are engaged:

All these considerations lead me to conclude, as others have concluded before me, that these are decisions of great moment to the claimant and that is why the courts have insisted on transparent, fair and careful assessments of extremely difficult questions with the importance of giving the benefit of the doubt to the claimant in a case of real doubt, when every other factor for and against has been appropriately weighed. Nothing more may be required, but nothing less will do.

I then turn to the look at the decision taken in June 2009 in the light of those principles. The purpose of that decision was set out in the first page of the assessment document The claimant was advised "of the purpose of the meeting and that the assessing workers were reviewing his age assessment in light of his legal challenge to the initial age assessment." The assessing workers were Albertha Golding and Dorriane Sultana, two of the three who had been involved with the previous assessment, although I accept that Albertha Golding only marginally so.

Stanley Burnton J in R(B) v Merton stressed the importance of that requirement of fair procedure at paragraphs 55 to 56:

It can be said that the principle of fair opportunity to disabuse a decision-maker goes right back to at least the case of re HK [1967] 2 QB 617. I accept, of course, Mr Maguire's submissions that this is not a requirement that is to be pedantically mandated in respect of every aspect of a case that can cause reasonable assessors to doubt age. In my judgment central allegations considered by the assessors to be of importance must be put. It is best done at a time when matters are fresh in minds and any errors or ambiguities of interpretation may then be identified. It was not done in this case.

I conclude that taking these defects cumulatively as a whole seriously undermines the fairness of the assessment procedure adopted in June. The June decision played particular attention to three matters. First, it was observed that he claimed that his age was nine in the photographic document, but his own counsel in the skeleton argument lodged in May had observed that he would have been 13 at the time.

Second, there was an inconsistency between what the claimant had said to a GP in a health assessment conducted on behalf of the authority in February 2009 about when his arm was broken: when he said he had broken it 18 months ago, and what he said to the assessors in April that when he went to Pakistan for medical treatment he could not remember when it was.

Third, in connection with the medical advice he received in Pakistan in connection with his arm, it was said that he was told that he needed another operation when he was 18 and the decision-makers in the assessment say that he said that he was worried as he was near that age, to which they infer the age of 18, and now. This last point is a particularly significant one. On the occasion of the April assessment he was found to be calm and co-operative with the social workers, rather than assertive and loud voiced as he had been criticised of being previously, but it was plain that at the beginning and throughout the interview he was maintaining that his age was 15 or so, as per the identity document. It is therefore suggested that he had inadvertently let slip that he recognised that his real age was close to 18.

In his witness statement the claimant says that this was an error in understanding and translation, and that what he was really trying to get across was that he was worried at the time he received the advice in Pakistan about his future prognosis at 18, because of the continuing problems with his elbow. In my judgment this is precisely the sort of important dispute that the presence of a solicitor, or an adult friend, or an adviser is intended to guard against. It is certainly the kind of inconsistency that must be put at the time to ensure that the assessors have accurately captured the information through the interpreter and any explanation that they might be able to obtain from the claimant in respect of it.

These are interviews conducted through interpreters and Stanley Burnton J himself observed in B at paragraph [52] how that provides further opportunity for errors of mutual understanding and distorting decisions on this question.

The court's concerns arising from these procedural failures have not been diminished, rather increased, when the interview notes taken in April were provided to it. Of course the court does not have the benefit of a witness statement from either of the social workers who undertook the assessment, for the reasons given in the chronology of this matter, and Mr McGuire was only able to offer very limited assistance on the notes, but there appear to be two sets of notes taken on 9 April, though precisely who took which is not known. The first set of notes that I shall call document A is in one hand and document B is in another hand. Document A records something about Pakistan in the following terms:

Mr McGuire, whose assistance I sought upon this topic, accepted that there are differences between the notes first as to what the question was about Afghanistan, namely was it how long he stayed there, or when he went there, and more strikingly there is no record in the notes of B of what was relied upon in the final assessment as a really significant answer, namely that he was worried that he was reaching that age, ie inferentially 18 now.

The striking inconsistency in the notes, and the fact that the writer of contemporary notes, version B, did not record what was subsequently relied upon as a really important answer, only adds to the court's concerns that this whole procedure should be quashed as procedurally unfair on conventional administrative law grounds. The question of whether a reasonable decision-maker could reach the decision he or she eventually comes to only arises at the end of the sequence of questions that the courts impose. There must be at first a fair procedure and a correct self-direction on material considerations and exclusion of immaterial ones.

Moreover, in my judgment, the June decision continues to be flawed by a failure to analyse or engage with the identity document. The first of the points taken against was the observation made by the claimant's counsel that the photograph would have shown a 13-year old child on the identity document if it was issued in 2007. That was a perfectly appropriate point to take at the time and the only information was the Council's own translation of the document. However, for reasons already analysed that fact, whilst it may give rise to an inconsistency as to what age the claimant says he was when the photograph was taken, gives rise to supporting evidence of the value of the document and confirming going back to 2003 and back to the date of birth. However, that point in the skeleton argument was thrown into doubt once the new translation became available in June of which the decision-makers were plainly aware, since they refer to it in the assessment on 15 June, but they did nothing to further investigate the point. They said this about the identity document:

There are a number of things wrong with that assessment. First, it is wrong to take the point made by counsel about age 13 against the claimant when that was made upon the previous translation of the document, and the local authority have now not directed their minds to the fact that that point may be wrong in the light of the information in the revised translation that they should have been aware of if they had engaged with the document properly. Either the new translation would show that the claimant was roughly the age he claimed to be when the document now appears to be issued, or the previous position would have been reverted to which authenticates the document, although does not remove the inconsistency in the claimant's assessment of his age of nine, albeit that the document indicates that something had happened at the age of nine with respect to the recording of his age.

Second, in my judgment this is not a case where the Social Services were entitled to ignore the document altogether on the basis that it is known that fraudulent documents have been obtained in the past to promote asylum applications, or indeed applications for age assessment.

In the skeleton argument lodged by the defendant in this case there is reference to the approach of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal with respect to documents generally in the case of Tanveer Ahmed v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2002] Imm App R 318. That submission was wisely not renewed in oral submissions by Mr. McGuire, but, in any event, I conclude that that point is not well-founded in this particular case. Unlike in an asylum case a claimant is not seeking to make out a claim to protection where the burden is upon him to establish his case. Here the local authority is engaged in an age assessment where, to some extent, the obligation is upon them to provide cogent reasons after a fair procedure as to why the claimed age, particularly where it is supported by the document that would normally be indicative of age, is to be objected. I have already quoted the guidance on the form which indicates the importance of the documents as the adjournment in December indicates that Croydon were aware that it was important.

Third, for reasons already noted there in my judgment, nothing about this document on its face to suggest that it is unusual or peculiar. It is the kind of document that is issued in Afghanistan when one needs it to progress in the education at school, as the Home Office COIR shows. That is precisely what the claimant said in his subsequent witness statement explaining why it was obtained. He was never, of course, asked about that in interview. The point is previously made that the dates on the document appear to pre-date any journey, so it does not look as if it was manufactured for the purpose of making an age assessment, and whatever age the claimant is on the photograph he is of a younger age that he was assessed to be when he arrived.

I appreciate, of course, that none of the above excludes the possibility that there was a margin of error in Afghanistan as to what the claimant's age really was at the time that the information that the document records that was gathered about his age was obtained, ie 2003 when he claimed to be nine. However, any such margin of error would be wholly unrelated to a bogus asylum claim, or a bogus claim to be younger than a claimed age, and there simply would be no reason to believe on the present material that the marriage would be particularly great. This is of many aspects of the difficulties arising with regard to certainty in a society which has not placed the premium upon contemporaneous registration at births that western societies have.

Apart from the extent to which the defendants have engaged with the document, there were further criticisms made of the assessment process in this case. I do not consider it necessary to labour this judgment by setting them all out. However, I do accept that there is substance in the complaint that the concluding sections of the June 2009 age assessment did not do what the guidance notes says is required, namely to balance the factors for and against the claimed age and to reach an objective assessment upon the totality of the material within this case: the assessment of demeanour, and particularly now the assessment that he was older than he claimed to be because he was calm in interview being taken into account.

In this particular context, in my judgment, any uncertainty as to how long, or for what purpose, the claimant was in Pakistan in connection with medical treatment would have to be seen in the context of his answers as a whole. In December 2008 he twice gave a narrative that his arm was injured 18 months prior to interview. The early reference to three years was not picked up or relied upon against him. He said the same thing to a doctor in February 2009. When he is asked about it again it is for a different purpose. Whether he was asked about how long he had been in Pakistan, or when he went to Pakistan, if he was not sure about either question he would be justified in being cautious, given the criticisms to which he had been subjected before when he was accused of speculating or not giving clear answers. That narrative of history needed to be weighed in the balance when it is apparent that whenever it was he received some treatment, and he says in his witness statement it was further treatment in Pakistan, it would have been within a range of dates that he had given information about consistently and previously.

None of this, of course, diminishes the weight that the court should attach to expert assessments that are carefully reasoned in accordance with the Merton Assessment form after hearing the enquiry as set out in the procedures given by this court to be important, and recognising the advantages that the expertise of witnesses have. Although in this case I stress that the court has not had the advantage of any witness statements from those who conducted the assessment. However, for the reasons that I have given, in my judgment, the June assessment was seriously flawed and cannot stand and again must be quashed. For the avoidance of doubt I will also quash the December decision as it was never formally rescinded and, in my judgment, the defendant may have continued to be influenced by factors in the same decision in their reconsideration in practice.

The matter, therefore, will have to be re-determined afresh. In that re-determination I expect the following aspects of good practice to be observed as an essential requirement of fairness: (1) the translation of the addendum document will need to be checked, and a final accurate version translating all the information that the document has on its face is obtained and disclosed to lawyers before any reassessment is concluded; (2) the lawyers of the claimant are to be informed if there is to be a fresh interview of the claimant; (3) the claimant has an opportunity of an independent adult to be present at any re-interview if he so wishes; (4) any information of significance that may result in a determination adverse to the claimant on the question of his assessment is identified and put to him in the course of that interview so that he can comment upon it; (5) the final assessment that may result from such a process is to be drawn up in a way that the guidance notes indicate, and supplied to the claimant and his legal team promptly after the conclusion of the assessment; (6) in the event that there is a narrow balance between factors for and against the age assessment of the claimant in the reassessment, then the application of the benefit of doubt principle should be identified in the reasoning process.

For those reasons I quash both decisions in this case.