The Government of the Canary Islands wants to accelerate as much as possible the legislative reforms to change the reception model for unaccompanied foreign minors who arrive in Spain. The law dictates that the care and guardianship of minors – foreign or not – corresponds to the autonomous communities, but for five years now the regions that receive the most children and adolescents have rebelled against a system that forces them to take in a disproportionate number of minors. compared to others. For a few years now, the Canary Islands have been leading this demand, and in recent months with more force: the archipelago is the destination of 70% of all irregular entries and already welcomes almost 4,400 children. “We need the change to be rapid. We must clear the way for the legal modification that is going to be made, even if the procedures are slower later,” the Canarian president, Fernando Clavijo, of the Canarian Coalition, explains to EL PAÍS. “Under current conditions we cannot guarantee a life project for these minors. “We can't even educate them.”
Clavijo met this Tuesday in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with the Minister of Migration, Elma Saiz, and insisted on the urgency of these legislative changes. He did it with a promise already on the table. The legal modification (without specifying which one) to resolve the distribution of migrant minors was one of the commitments assumed by the PSOE with the Canarian Coalition to carry out the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The agreement stated verbatim: “Initiate the process that culminates in the necessary regulatory modifications to ensure that the powers of unaccompanied foreign minors are not the exclusive responsibility of the communities to which they arrive.” The minister, for her part, told journalists: “The Government complies with what it signs.” But the path, explored repeatedly in recent years, is not easy.
Initiatives to improve care for migrant children have occurred over the years with little success. The most that has been achieved in the last five years has been a Response Plan in which the autonomous communities have committed to distributing 400 minors arriving in Ceuta and the Canary Islands in 2022 and 2023. “It is insufficient,” as Clavijo has lamented in several occasions, but a milestone if one takes into account that the autonomous communities have always been reluctant to take on the reception of foreign minors arriving in other territories. In this distribution, which took into account the population, unemployment or the number of minors already taken in, La Rioja, for example, accepted 36 minors; Galicia, 35; Catalonia and Madrid, another 30 children; Andalusia, 28 and Castilla y León, 28. The one that assumed the least was Navarra, which had a quota of 15 minors.
Current legislation determines that the autonomous communities have jurisdiction over the protection of children. This should not be an obstacle for the first reception system for these children to be the co-responsibility of all public administrations, including the State, which can also collaborate in financing. The key is what law or laws will be changed and how to address this issue. And it is not clear. Both the Immigration Law, the Asylum Law and the Comprehensive Child Protection Law affect this group.
Sources from the Government of the Canary Islands explain that their legal team is working on a proposal for legislative modification that they hope to have ready on January 15 to send to Madrid. The Canary Islands' bet, in principle, is to modify the Immigration Law, “add an article in which the responsibility of the State is established” and move it forward through a decree law. Sources who have worked in the protection of minors in different institutions see this alternative as not very viable. “It could be achieved in March,” the regional Executive aspires. The Canary Islands do not intend to renounce the guardianship of minors who arrive in their territory, but rather they want the State to assume their primary care and distribute them by quota to other communities. He also calls for more funding for this matter.
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New protocol
Already in 2019, when the Children's Observatory was working on a new protocol for the care of foreign minors, the possibility of creating a new regulatory text to establish a Statute of migrant childhood and adolescence. In fact, one of the measures that was put on the table was the creation of centers managed by the State to give the first reception to foreign minors, study their situation and, from there, refer them equitably to the different communities. autonomous. But nothing that was proposed then came off paper.
Beyond the legislative modifications and political agreements that will be necessary to carry them out, there is an important issue. The Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it clear that the status of an immigrant cannot take precedence over that of a minor, so foreign children must enjoy the same rights and protection as any other child. Neither Migrations nor the Ministry of Youth and Children have clarified to EL PAÍS the legislative possibilities with which they are working to definitively address the problem.
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