UK Tribunal Awards £25k to Afghan Migrant After Age Misclassification Dispute

An Afghan asylum seeker, initially classified as an adult based on physical traits like a protruding Adam's apple, has been legally recognized as a 17-year-old minor by the UK Upper Tribunal, which overturned a local council's flawed age assessment. The St Helens Borough Council had originally assessed the claimant as being between 23 and 25 years old, relying on physical features without medical evidence, a practice the tribunal deemed "pseudoscientific" and procedurally unfair. The tribunal set the claimant's birthdate as January 5, 2007, confirming he was a minor upon arriving in late 2023, fleeing Taliban threats linked to his father's police work. The boy's initial misstatement of his birth year was attributed to exhaustion, malnutrition, and unfamiliarity with the Gregorian calendar, as his community used a lunar calendar system and did not mark birthdays. Following the successful appeal, the migrant was awarded £25,000 to cover legal fees due to the council's flawed process and improper reliance on physical characteristics for age determination. This case highlights the challenges and potential injustices in assessing the age of young migrants based on physical appearance alone without comprehensive medical evaluations.