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.
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 61 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.
We are asking the Home Office to address urgent questions around accuracy, efficacy, and discriminatory risks of the system, as well as a lack of legal justification, adequate safeguards, and accountability mechanisms.
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. This does not give confidence that young people sub
