There are minors in adult centers and adults in juvenile centers. The Ombudsman has reflected in his annual report a reality that seems to have become normal in Spain and that remains without a solution: the identification and reception of migrant minors fails. The arrival of more than 40,000 migrants to the Canary Islands has left more than 5,300 children and adolescents on the islands and a monumental challenge of identification, care and reception that shows its seams every day.
The failures in identification have been seen for months and in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, the Government of the Canary Islands declares itself collapsed due to the number of children it welcomes and demands a legislative change to force other territories to share responsibilities. But, on the other hand, the system supposedly guaranteeing children leaves such gaps that minors have appeared throughout the Peninsula. Children who had been transferred from the archipelago as if they were adults. The Community of Madrid alone, according to sources familiar with the situation, has received almost a thousand alleged minors who arrived from the Canary Islands to the capital as adults who it has had to accommodate in its minor centers.
The Ombudsman points out in his report how all the actors involved — from the Prosecutor's Office to the Red Cross, to the Police — contribute to a situation in which migrant minors end up unprotected.
One of the issues that Ángel Gabilondo focuses on is the first identification at the port, the first filter that ends up marking the destination of those who arrive without documentation and “whose minority cannot be established with certainty.”
In this sense, the defender maintains that the National Police, which must communicate these and transfer the alleged minors to the protection services, needs “precise instructions” on the scope of the issue. He also points out the importance of agents being assisted by interpreters and personnel specialized in childhood “that allows them to make an initial decision.”
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Gabilondo does not mention it specifically, but points to the Red Cross, the organization that provides first assistance in port. The defender recalls that the organization, subsidized by the Ministry of Migration, has among its functions “the detection and identification of minors”, in addition to coordination with security forces, health services and child protection. To the latter, the institution recommends that they should also be at the foot of the pier.
Finally, and as is common in other reports, the Ombudsman points out the Prosecutor's Office and its tendency to demand age determination procedures for those children in whom the minority is not in doubt and for those who, in addition to claim that they are not adults, they have documentation that corroborates it.
The Prosecutor's Office demands a new law that regulates the procedure for determining the age of unaccompanied foreign minors, but the defender maintains that until this new protocol is a reality, the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court “maintains the criterion that if the If the interested party provides a birth certificate or passport that has not been challenged, it is not reasonable to consider them undocumented. [y someterle a las pruebas]”. Despite this, the Ombudsman assures that he receives numerous complaints in which “it becomes clear that this jurisprudential criterion is not always applied.”
The minors chapter is extensive in the report, and warns of delays in documenting children or the lack of conditions in shelters.
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