London – The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has formally assessed the UK Government’s response to its 2024 recommendations on the Prevent duty as “unsatisfactory”, in a letter [1] to the UK Government dated 26 August 2026 and published today by Prevent Watch.
In August 2024 [2], the Committee recommended that the UK suspend the Prevent duty, adopt safeguards against profiling and discrimination, and establish independent monitoring and remedies for those affected.
Reviewing the Government’s one-year progress report, the Committee regrets “the lack of detailed information on the concrete measures adopted by the State Party to revise the CONTEST and Prevent counter-terrorism strategies, including the Prevent duty, with a view to eliminating any discriminatory and disproportionate impact”.
On the two bodies the Government presents as safeguards, the Home Office’s Standards and Compliance Unit and the Independent Prevent Commissioner, the Committee finds that “their mandate is primarily aimed at strengthening and expanding the Prevent programme to meet its counter-terrorism objectives, rather than ensuring independent oversight… which risks reinforcing its disproportionate impact on ethnic and ethno-religious minorities”.
The Committee reiterates its call to:
- suspend the Prevent duty and asks the UK to “halt further expansion of the Prevent programme”;
- publish “annual disaggregated data on all Prevent referrals, in particular by ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex and age”;
- “[e]stablish a fully independent oversight mechanism of Prevent, with statutory powers”; and
- “[e]stablish a statutory right for individuals referred to Prevent, including children and their families and individuals referred in the past, to be informed of the referral, its grounds, the personal data recorded” and who it was shared with, together with the right to challenge and erase that data.
Home Office figures published in August [4] show a record 10,293 Prevent referrals in the year to September 2025: more than half were children, 56% had no ideology identified, and 60% required no further action. Ethnicity was recorded for only 52% of referrals. No data on religion is published.
Dr Layla Aitlhadj, Director of Prevent Watch [5], said:
“While the Government drags its feet on suspending Prevent, referrals of children keep climbing. There were twenty-eight referrals a day last year, the highest number ever, and more than half of them were children. Every day ministers delay, another classroom’s worth of children goes through a damaging process the UN has said should stop.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors
- The letter, ref. CERD/118th Session/FU/CS/CS/ks, is signed by Gün Kut, Chair of CERD, and follows the Committee’s 118th-session review of the UK’s follow-up report on paragraphs 30, 34 and 52 of its 2024 Concluding Observations. OHCHR publishes UK treaty-body documents at https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_
layouts/15/TreatyBodyExternal/ countries.aspx?CountryCode= GBR&Lang=EN - The Committee’s 2024 Concluding Observations on the UK (CERD/C/GBR/CO/24-26), including the Prevent recommendation at paragraph 34: https://docs.un.org/en/CERD/C/
GBR/CO/24-26 - CERD is the body of eighteen independent experts that monitors the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the UK ratified in 1969: https://www.ohchr.org/en/
treaty-bodies/cerd - Home Office, “Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme, October 2024 to September 2025”, published 6 August 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/
statistics/individuals- referred-to-prevent-to- september-2025 - Prevent Watch’s submissions to the Committee, including its May 2026 follow-up submission can be found at: https://www.preventwatch.org/
prevent-watch-submissions-to- the-united-nations/ - UNICEF UK Rights Respecting Schools Award: https://www.unicef.org.uk/
rights-respecting-schools/the- rrsa/about-the-rrsa/ - Prevent Watch supports people affected by Prevent through casework, documentation and advocacy: https://www.preventwatch.org. Media: contact@preventwatch.org.
