The withdrawal of the UK from the EU affected many categories of people, but little was said so far about the situation of migrants. After Brexit, the UK can apply its own standard of protection of the rights of migrants, including the particularly vulnerable unaccompanied minors, without being bound by EU relevant legislation. This, however, is raising concern in light of an established practice of the UK authorities which adds to the fact that the UK House of Commons recently approved the Illegal Immigration Bill, a legislation that aims to ‘prevent and deter unlawful migration’ with 312 MP in favor and 249 against. Recently, the UK Immigration Minister announced further plans to house illegal migrants in various locations, as army barracks and surplus military sites or on vessels and barges in local authorities across the UK.
Three Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations warn publicly against the policies and practices that the UK is supporting against unaccompanied minors as a part of its new, post Brexit, migration policy. Siobhán Mullally (Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons) Felipe González Morales (Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants) and Tomoya Obokata (Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery) recently endorsed a statement against the policy of the UK government on unaccompanied migrants.
According to the UN experts, there is an established policy and practice of housing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in temporary hotel accommodations instead of under the responsibility of local authorities. Placing unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in hotels eventually leaves them outside of the child protection system and represents a discrimination vis a vis accompanied migrant children and other migrants.
This policy is exposing a particularly fragile category of migrants and is eventually causing the disappearance of several of them. The Special Rapporteurs ‘are deeply concerned at reports that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are going missing and are at high risk of being trafficked within the UK’. According to the Report out of the 4.600 unaccompanied children who have been housed in hotels since June 2021, 440 children have disappeared and 220 remained unaccounted for as of 23 January 2023. The majority of these are Albanian nationals.
The UN experts repeated the urgent need to trace the missing children, and to provide human rights compliant reception conditions and protection for unaccompanied children seeking asylum, without discrimination on grounds of nationality, migration status, race, ethnicity and/or gender. They also noted that ‘The UK Government appears to be failing to abide by its core obligations under international human rights law to ensure the best interests of the child, without discrimination, and to prevent trafficking of children’.
Although the UK has left the EU, it is still a member of several international agreements on fundamental rights, including the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugee and the European Convention of Human Rights. The behavior and policies described above, although their exact impact has yet to be assessed, are likely to represent a challenge for the obligations that the UK has taken over by being a party to these international instruments.
The emergence of this tendency soon after the departure of the UK from the EU bloc is also deeply worrying and revealing of the importance of the ‘external constraints’ (as supranational organization alike the EU often are) to promote virtuous behaviors that are consistent with international obligations. The UK, post Brexit, has perhaps gained more freedom, but at the expenses of the most vulnerable categories, like unaccompanied migrants.
Giovanni Zaccaroni (assistant professor of EU law at the University of Milan-Bicocca).
The opinions expressed in this blog represent the position of the author and not the one of the FAMIMOVE team. Photo credits Wikimedia Commons
Picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugee_kids_with_a_journalis.jpg
No Comments