UNHCR Home | Children

David Vs Goliath (continued) While on paper, children’s rights are nearly universally recognized (all but two countries have ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child), they still face numerous forms of persecution, such as child labor, rape, female genital mutilation, forced military recruitment or are made to witness the torture or execution of parents and older siblings. It is therefore no surprise that parents try to send their children to safety, or that children try to escape on their own. As early as 1938 and 1939, 10,000 German and Austrian Jewish children were saved from the Holocaust by the legendary “Kindertransporte” when their parents put them on trains and boats to England. It is now widely recognized that children may be refugees in their own right. In 1996, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board issued Guidelines on Child Refugee Claimants, the first produced by any country operating a refugee determination system. Two years later, the United States’ Immigration and Naturalization Service published its own Guidelines for Children’s Asylum Claims. Both recognize that children may experience persecution differently from adults, and that child-sensitive status determination procedures are needed. The most favored destinations for separated asylum seeking children are in western Europe, especially the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Switzerland. A recent initiative of the UNHCR and the International Save the Children Alliance created the Separated Children in Europe Program, a network of non-governmental agencies working with children in 28 countries. One of the network’s biggest concerns is that while some of these children are indeed refugees, others are victims of traffickers who bring them to lucrative European markets to work as prostitutes or cheap labor—and some are both. Few separated children are recognized as refugees in western countries. In Europe the average recognition rate in 1999 was around five percent. In most countries, the problem is dealt with in a piecemeal way. Canadian officials freely recognize that they never gave it much attention until the summer of 1999, when around 130 Chinese children arrived, without their parents, on four boats on the country’s west coast. And although UNHCR issued Guidelines on Policies and Procedures in Dealing with Unaccompanied Children Seeking Asylum in 1997, some of the agency’s most basic recommendations are still not followed. GUIDELINES The Guidelines highlight issues which governments and child welfare agencies need to tackle. The most basic is the definition of a ‘separated’ child as one who is under 18 years of age, outside his or her country of origin and without parents or other legal or customary guardians to care for or protect the child. This sounds straightforward, but such children frequently arrive with false documents or with no papers at all. Many are unwilling or unable to tell their age. The authorities, reluctant to be ‘duped’ into giving special treatment to adults posing as children, often set out to prove—through x-rays, dental examinations or other techniques—that the applicants are in fact over 18. But age assessments, even if they are safe, non-invasive and culturally appropriate, are only approximate at best, and children may be denied the special measures to which they are entitled, if they are incorrectly identified as adults.

«Page 1		Page 3»