BackSpain Acting Ombudsman, Mª Luisa Cava de Llano presented the report “Children or adults? Age assessment practices”. This publication gathers the deficiencies encountered during these procedures and discusses the 41 recommendations made by the Institution to address them.
Among the major conclusions of this report is the conviction of the scientific community that wide margins of error exist among the range of currently available age determination techniques, such as bone maturity analyses and dental mineralization testing.
The Spanish Ombudsman Institution has found that age assessment practices do not offer sufficient safeguards. It was also discovered that each Spanish region applies different criteria, and there is a lack of coordination among the range of agencies involved in age estimation procedures.
