Last week we learned about the worrying turn in the European negotiations on the European Pact on Migration and Asylum. According to a document leaked to the media last Wednesday, it is proposed that all migrant and refugee children over the age of 6 can be detained at the European borders where they have arrived to request protection, whether they do so alone or accompanied by their parents. families. That they are detained until there is a decision about their asylum application. That if this request is rejected, they will continue to be detained until their deportation. At the same time, States experiencing exceptional situations of migratory arrivals will be allowed to extend the detention periods initially planned.
This would mark a worsening of the current situation, which already allows children over the age of 12 to be subjected to border procedures, involving their detention and rushed asylum assessments, and to continue with plans to fingerprint those children. of six years or more through the Eurodac biometric database. The original proposal already failed to comply with the internationally recognized definition of a child, which does not allow any discrimination between people under 18 years of age in the enjoyment of their fundamental rights and procedural guarantees. The alleged crime for which boys and girls over 6 years of age would be locked up: seeking protection in a region that prides itself on exporting human rights to the world.
Europe should be a refuge, protecting and welcoming children instead of detaining and deporting them. Our asylum system must work to safeguard children with an immigration pact that guarantees, and does not threaten, the rights and protection of boys and girls. This would imply that there is no detention or deportation of children, that rapid family reunifications are ensured and that all immigration decisions are made in the best interests of the children. It especially hurts that an agreement like this is reached within the framework of our country's presidency of the European Council. Spain, which last year managed to adopt one of the most cutting-edge regulations in the world regarding childhood: the law for the protection of children and adolescents against violence.
Europe should be a refuge, welcoming children instead of detaining and deporting them
If this proposal to lower the minimum age of immigration detention is approved, Europe has broken the pact. The ethical and moral pact on which it has brought together the societies of the 27 countries that make it up today, very different from each other, convincing them that “many few do much.” The collective pact on which it has been built and that has turned it into a global symbol of human rights and freedoms. The pact based on the firm conviction that borders hinder the human and economic development of societies, and that diversity and free movement are a strength and an opportunity. The pact by which the various forms of discrimination have progressively faded away and has distanced us from fear of the other.
But we must remember that whoever breaks pays. If the law goes ahead we will pay morally for this idea that a passport is enough to deny children their right to be protected. We will pay for the incoherence advocated by immigration policies, which find no legal fit in the human rights system built in the last 30 years. We will pay for the establishment of first and second class citizens. And we will pay in the long term for the message that is imposed on future generations that we are not all equal before the law. Europe: do not break the pact.
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