Child detention report update
QCEA have updated their damning report on child immigration detention in Europe
The Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) has updated its damning report on child immigration and detention to include some of Europe’s most up-to-date statistics.
The Child Immigration Detention in Europe report has been updated after ‘extensive consultation’ following the report’s release in 2017, which used ‘the most precise statistics available concerning the numbers of children held in detention for their migration status’.
The report addresses three questions: ‘How many children are detained in the context of migration?’ ‘What laws and policies regulate the practice?’ and ‘What are the existing alternatives to child immigration detention?’
The updated report concludes that ‘far too many children are still held in secure facilities across Europe, either with or without their parents’. It says that governments frame migration as a security issue, despite the fact that ‘the number of people irregularly coming to Europe has dramatically decreased’.
According to the report, more than 186,000 migrants arrived in Europe in 2017, ‘a fifty-two per cent decrease compared to 387,739 reported in 2016 and an eighty-two per cent decrease when compared with more than the [one] million people registered in 2015’.
The report also highlights what it calls ‘concerning developments’. It says: ‘The European Migration Network mentions in its 2017 annual report that several EU member states increased their detention capacities or planned to expand their facilities’.
Examples include a new detention centre for families in Belgium, and, in France, ‘the government’s new immigration law failed to ban child detention and has even extended the possibility for detention up to ninety days, including for accompanied minors.’
Sylvain Mossou, from the QCEA Human Rights programme, concludes in the summary: ‘While there is a growing international consensus on the need for alternatives to detaining children, European countries appear to continue doing so… Our report insists on the need to implement alternative care arrangements that would ensure that children are protected from a seemingly costly, ineffective and harmful approach. Detention is not the solution and there are other ways to manage migration in line with a child’s best interests.’
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