A child is a child

Three is an emerging widening gap between a growing international consensus on ending child immigration detention and EU law and national legislators. EU law puts some limitations on detention of child migrants, but does not prohibit it. And, while laws and policies are drafted in order to ensure that detention remains an exceptional measure for children, civil society organisations suggests that the reality is otherwise.

In many countries, including across Europe, it is difficult to get an accurate picture of the number of migrants and refugees being held in detention. We do not know how many children are detained. Data is not easily available to the public, let alone disaggregated, and does not sufficiently take into account the gender dimension. Having comprehensive and comparable data is an important element on which stakeholders, especially decision makers, need to rely on in order to design and implement adequate policies and measures.

The main conclusion is that detention is never in the best interests of a child and it has detrimental impact on their health and well-being. While there is an international growing consensus on the need for alternatives to detaining children, European countries are continuing the practice. And yet, there are alternatives; some are not sufficiently used and others could be improved. This effort requires support for multiculturally trained staff and guardians and adequately equipped security, healthcare, psychological and educational services that are calibrated by gender-sensitive approaches.

Related posts:

The fundamental problem with Blockchain is that the order of the blocks doesn’t necessarily mean that was the order in which the transactions were done. Whenever a user initiates a transaction, the…

There were six of us. And then, abruptly, there were five. It happened overnight, except the truth was that it was over dinner. It was late in the summer, an August evening — warm and sultry, which…

Someone is having a glamourous twentieth anniversary. That someone is L’Oréal Paris. The company collaborates with the company Perfect Corp. for this year’s Cannes Film. L’Oréal Paris and Perfect…