Bone tired: unaccompanied minors and age assessment practices in the Belgian asylum system. How can age determination be restructured in accordance with the best interests of the child?

Abstract

In Belgium, the question of a young asylum seeker’s age is not simply technical. It can determine whether a person is treated as a child or as an adult, with immediate consequences for guardianship, reception, procedural safeguards, education, healthcare, and protection from detention or removal. Focusing on unaccompanied minors in the Belgian asylum system, this thesis examines the legal framework governing age determination, its implementation in Belgium, and its compatibility with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly the principle of the best interests of the child. Adopting a socio-legal approach, the research combines legal, policy, and academic sources with four qualitative interviews with asylum seekers who underwent age assessment during their asylum procedure in Belgium. The analysis finds that Belgian age assessment practices are only partially compatible with the CRC. While identifying minors is a legitimate child-protection objective, the current framework relies heavily on contested medical examinations and remains weakened by opaque doubt procedures, insufficient safeguards, limited consent guarantees, weak remedies, and the serious consequences of misclassification. The thesis therefore argues for a more holistic and multidisciplinary framework that gives greater weight to vulnerability than to chronological age, manages uncertainty through the benefit of the doubt, and strengthens safeguards where exclusion from protection is most likely to occur. In doing so, it highlights the need to treat age assessment as a child-protection procedure rather than a tool of migration control.