In Calais, more than 300 unaccompanied minor refugees live in miserable conditions and do not benefit from any protection, according to the Defender of Rights.
They are 310 in Calais. Children and adolescents, unaccompanied minors, left to fend for themselves in a “situation of great vulnerability”. The Defender of Rights in France is issuing a new alert on the minor refugees, who arrived alone in the region of Calais in the hope of crossing over to England. the report that he draws up, accompanied by recommendations, sends shivers down the spine.
“Elusiveness”
A quarter of these children are under fifteen; the youngest has only seven. They live in “extremely miserable” living conditions and benefit from largely inadequate protection. The cause, in particular, is a great difficulty in integrating them into the census, monitoring and care systems.
All the local actors thus agree on the complexity of “convincing them to enter the system, in particular because of the group effect, of adult third parties (well-intentioned or not) and of their vigilance. about the opportunities to move to the UK ”.
This “elusiveness” of children generates great insecurity. At the beginning of March, the British association Help Refugees thus alerted to the fate of 129 missing children in the Calais jungle. For the Defender of Rights, there is an urgent need to put in place more appropriate monitoring of these unaccompanied minors.
“The current shelter system does not take into account the specific nature of unaccompanied minors in Calaisis, their journey and their tenacious desire to reach England. The result of this specificity is that most of the time minors only spend on the sheltering system, without any stabilization being considered, ”explains Jacques Toubon.
Responsibility of France
The Defender of Rights therefore recommends modifying “the methods of approaching unaccompanied minors in the shantytown” and organizing specific patrols to “manage to stabilize identified minors”. He also recommends “to carry out a real educational action for their benefit”, while the right to education in French schools is “still far from being assured”.
In addition, “any new decision to evacuate or dismantle the slum” must be “deferred”, to “make it possible to ensure upstream the effective implementation of the approach, reception and release system. shelter for unaccompanied minors in Calais ”. The protection of these children constitutes “an exceptional challenge falling under the shared responsibility of the State and the department”.
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