The Official Gazette of the Canary Islands published this Thursday a new protocol that establishes more requirements for the delivery to the Canary Government by the State Security Forces of unaccompanied migrant minors who arrive on the islands, a measure that sharpens the pulse that the autonomous Executive maintains with the central government on the subject of immigration. The new text requires a series of steps that, according to the Canary Government, were included in the 2014 protocol and that were not being complied with until now, which is generating a “disorder”, according to the legal text, and slowing down the entry into the reception facilities of the new arrivals.
Among other things, the Executive is demanding, as of this Thursday, a prior identification report and registration in the register of minors (RMENA). It also demands an administrative resolution of individualized assignment or placement from the corresponding State body, and that for this there has been a prior hearing with the minor, in the presence of an interpreter of his/her mother tongue or another that he/she can understand, and that this has taken place with the knowledge of the Prosecutor’s Office. Once the availability of a place has been confirmed, finally, it demands a formal act of delivery with individualized documentation and that this takes place in a police station of the Autonomous Police of the Canary Islands or, “where they do not exist, in the authorized places.”
The Canarian Executive assures in the text that accompanies the new protocol that there is “disorder” in the delivery of minors by the National Police to the staff of the entities. This delivery is carried out, it assures, “without direct control by the autonomous Administration or an individual administrative resolution of location or assignment of the minor by the State to the Canary Islands, nor a decree from the Public Prosecutor’s Office to place the minor at the disposal of the minor.” For this reason, sources from the Government assure, “it is not possible to correctly identify” each minor, since in the group delivery there is no photograph that relates him with his name, so that “his proper identification and traceability is at risk”, with the consequent “confusion of identities between minors.”
The publication of this new protocol coincides with a moment of extreme tension between the central and Canary governments regarding the transfer of some of the approximately 5,600 unaccompanied migrant minors under the guardianship of the archipelago. This Tuesday, the Canary Islands president, Fernando Clavijo, turned his back on the PSOE (with whom he has an investiture agreement) and publicly made official a pact with the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to unify criteria on how the transfer of migrant minors between communities should be carried out. This alliance has caused unrest in La Moncloa.
Previously, on Monday 2 September, Clavijo himself had lashed out in the media against Pedro Sánchez’s Executive. That day he threatened to take the State to court for the handover of the minors after a clash the previous Friday, as he explained, between the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office and the heads of the NGOs on a dock in El Hierro. This episode served the nationalist leader to ensure that he was going to demand strict compliance with the admission protocols, approved by the Government of Mariano Rajoy in 2014, so that the General Directorate for the Protection of Children and Families assumes their guardianship. “We are not going to be complicit in normalising an emergency situation where the rights of the minor cannot be guaranteed,” he said then.
On the same day, the 2nd, the Canary Islands Government Council approved a proposal for an agreement that prohibited collaborating entities “from receiving new migrants at the expense of this autonomous community, except with prior notification of compliance or express authorization from the competent autonomous authorities.” This decision led the NGO Spanish Immigration and Refugee Aid Network to register on the 10th before the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands an administrative appeal against this movement, which it considers “contrary to the fundamental rights of minors and the best interests of the minor.”
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For months, the Canary Islands have declared themselves “overwhelmed” by the arrival of unaccompanied minors. The central and regional governments drew up a proposal to reform the immigration law that should have allowed the transfer of minors to other autonomous communities. However, the PP —Clavijo’s government partner in the Canary Islands—, Junts and Vox rejected its consideration in Congress on July 23. PSOE, Partido Popular and the Canary Islands Government have held various meetings during the summer to bring their positions closer together, with both parties —central government, on the one hand; regional executive and PP on the other— accusing each other of the lack of agreement.
Up to August, 25,524 people have arrived in the Canary Islands in cayucos, 6,267 of them during the months of July and August, a record figure for a summer since detailed monthly records of migratory flows have been available. In the second half of August, arrivals on the Canary Islands’ coasts shot up with 3,220 new cases, which means that almost half of the migrant arrivals this summer have been recorded in the last fifteen days, according to data from the Biweekly report released this Monday by the Ministry of the InteriorOf this total, according to the Canarian Government, 3,418 are minors.
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