Denmark: Asylum seekers were caught lying about their age

World News Adina Camarasu
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After the increased flow of migrants last year, Denmark has implemented tough policies on this issue.

In August, the government proposed a law to allow them to reject asylum seekers from  country’s borders.

It has been found out that ¾ of the asylum seekers who have declared to Danish immigration service they were children, turned out to be adults.

Denmark implemented an age test to be applied to all migrants seeking for Danish asylum starting 2016.

Until now, nearly 800 people were age-tested and it has been discovered that more than half of them lied about their age.

The test is performed with an X-ray machine, that is designed to scan peoples’ teeth and fingerprints. The tests are conducted by The Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen, as Jyllands-Posten stated.

Researchers have acknowledged that teeth scanning may not be 100% exact. The estimations may be wrong, presenting someone’s age with an error up to three years.

Integration minister Inger Stølberg declared: ‘The Danish Immigration Service makes a major effort to expose those who are cheating and is also working on how it can happen even faster.’

But Eva Singer, head of asylum at the Danish Refugee Council, stated: ‘There are many of these young people who don’t know precisely how old they are because it is not something that is registered in their home countries in the same way as it is in Denmark.’

Children enjoy a privileged treatment when seeking asylum in Denmark, including the possibility of their parents to join them.

Rowan Farrell, co-founder of Refugee Info Bus declared for The Independent: ‘A lot of the 16 and 17-year-olds in the camp look very weathered. Refugees and migrants who look a lot older.’

‘But then you speak to them and see that they speak and act like a child, because they are in fact a child’, he concluded.