More than 18,000 migrant children are believed to have gone missing in Europe between 2018 and 2020, according to a report published on 18 April by Lost in Europe, an international journalistic investigation.
“A previous report by the European Migration Network indicated that between 2014 and 2017, more than 30,000 migrant children slipped through the protection systems in Europe. The current figures are therefore lower, at first sight”, says the NGO Missing Children Europe in a statement, “but if we take into account the flow linked to the crisis (of 2015/2016) and the current number of children crossing the EU borders, the picture changes dramatically”.
In 2020, however, only 10 member states provided figures which “show that 5,768 minor asylum seekers disappeared in 2020. This means that the real number of missing children could be much higher than the 18,292 calculated”.
When contacted, the Commission indicated that it had alerted Member States to “the need to take measures to prevent and respond to children going missing in migration, for example by improving data collection and cross-border collaboration with competent authorities” in a 2017 Communication.
It also proposed some actions in the framework of the ‘Strategy on the Rights of the Child’.
It notes that a European Migration Network report on the subject was published in April 2020 and that it is committed to addressing the shortcomings identified.
This report already highlighted that many countries do not have reliable or comprehensive data on missing unaccompanied minors. “It is therefore not possible to accurately quantify the extent of this phenomenon at European level”.
The available data also suggested that most of the missing unaccompanied minors reported between 2017 and 2019 were over 15 years of age and that the vast majority of them were boys. The three most frequently cited countries of nationality for these young people were Afghanistan, Morocco and Algeria.
Link to the NMS report: https://bit.ly/32yNjCX (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)