Who is a Child? Age Assessment Procedures and the Erosion of the Presumption of Minority in International Human Rights Law

Every protection owed to an unaccompanied or separated child depends upon a prior finding that the person concerned is in fact a child. A determination of majority does not simply redirect an applicant into a different procedure; it removes, in a single administrative step, the whole body of rights conferred by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article argues that the benefit of the doubt in age assessment operates as a rule allocating the burden of proof, and not as a discretionary indulgence, and that recent State practice has reversed that allocation. Its central submission is that where the margin of error of an assessment method extends across the age of majority, the method cannot lawfully be treated as determinative. The argument is developed through the views of the Committee on the Rights of the Child under the third Optional Protocol, the recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights, and two legislative developments: Part 4 of the United Kingdom’s Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and Article 25 of the European Union’s Asylum Procedure Regulation, which became applicable on 12 June 2026. The article then considers the Indian position, where Section 94 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 lays down a documentary hierarchy that is, in principle, more protective than several European regimes, but which presupposes records that an undocumented foreign child cannot produce.