UK child detention figures expose a gap the Home Office cannot litigate away
74%. Nearly 100 children held as adults under the UK-France migration accord, documented now by the scrutiny body the Home Office itself appointed — which means the evidentiary foundation for any legal challenge is being built by the government's own instrument. The relevant standard here is not political: it is whether administrative detention of minors without age-appropriate classification satisfies the proportionality requirements embedded in the European Convention on Human Rights as domestically incorporated, and whether the bilateral framework authorizing that detention displaces those protections or simply failed to address them. Frameworks written to manage flows rarely specify what happens to the ones who fall between categories. The legal standard that will govern this: whether the deprivation of liberty was necessary, proportionate, and individually assessed — for each child, not for the policy.
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