Case No. UKUT-00338-(IAC)

[2013] UKSC 39; [2014] AC 700.66.Ms Weston submitted that the Tribunal must take account of the best interests of the child in considering whether to make an order for specific disclosure in such cases. We disagree, since that submission assumes what must be established in the proceedings; the age of the person concerned. We doubt that consideration of section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 would add much if anything to the enquiry required by Article 8 ECHR in any event. 67.As Lord Bingham stated in Tweed v Parades Commission, the test will always be whether the disclosure in question is necessary to determine the matter in issue. Whether it is necessary and proportionate to make such an order will be for the Tribunal in question. We consider Ms Weston to have been correct in her oral submission that there should be some ‘trigger’ for such an application. Whether that is because it transpires that a young person has a previously undisclosed social media account or because, as in R (LS) v London Borough of Brent, some other matter is discovered which tends to suggest a previous lack of candour, there should be some specific reason for the application. We accept Ms Weston’s contention that the submission at [11] of Mr Harrop-Griffiths’ skeleton (“[t]here is much information that could be relevant to the determination of age”) will not suffice.68.At the risk of extending Ms Weston’s analogy too far, we consider that there should also be a specific target when an application for specific disclosure is made. On the facts of this case, for example, there has understandably been a focus on the applicant’s Facebook account and the activity on that account before he arrived in the United Kingdom. Had his solicitors failed to disclose the posts which he made in Serbia, the respondent might properly have asked for an order that the applicant’s Facebook activity between one date and another be disclosed.69.We have made scant reference thus far to the expert report of Dr Veale. We have factored his concerns into our analysis insofar as we have considered it necessary to do so. We recognise and record that he expressed particular reservations about the reliability of the ‘timeline’ and any view formed by a Meta platform about the age of a particular user. We also note that he had further concerns about the scope of the information which would be produced by the ‘Download Your Information’ function on Facebook. We did not hear argument on these points and do not consider it necessary to attempt to resolve them, since there was no attempt on the part of the respondent in this case to support the salient part of the order made after the Case Management Hearing. Such objections might need to be considered in the context of applications for specific disclosure, however. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing we have said in this judgment is intended in any way to undermine or even to revisit what was said on that subject in