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David Vs Goliath (continued). A teenage girl from West Africa was sent to live with her ‘uncle’ in Canada, only to confess in terror some months later to a church worker that she was pregnant with the uncle’s child, hadn’t been to school, hadn’t applied for asylum, and was being forced to work as a servant. Legal advice is often as rare as guardianship, though asylum procedures in western countries are difficult to navigate without legal assistance. Few separated children seeking asylum know they have the right to a lawyer, or how to obtain one, and even fewer are able to pay for one. Training for people working with asylum seeking children would help. Immigration and refugee determination officials, legal representatives, guardians, interpreters and others who come in contact with separated children would all benefit from special training to understand the principles and standards of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international laws. They need to have knowledge of the children’s countries of origin and of relevant cultural issues. Learning how to conduct child-appropriate and child-friendly interviews can help to ensure that children’s needs are properly assessed and addressed. Few separated children are recognized as refugees in western countries. In Europe the average recognition rate in 1999 was around five percent. NO EASY MATTER But deciding just what is in the best interests of a child is no easy matter, even though Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child dictates that it must be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children. Just how difficult this can be has been illustrated by the debate in Canada with respect to the Chinese children who arrived by boat, most of whose asylum applications were rejected. Is it in a child’s best interests to be returned to parents who knowingly put the child on a dangerously unseaworthy vessel and sold him or her into a type of modern-day slavery? Or to be allowed to go free, into the arms of the ‘snakeheads’? Few separated children are recognized as refugees in most western countries, though in Canada the recognition rate is around 50 percent. In 1999, the average recognition rate in Europe was only around five percent, though countries often allow these children to remain on humanitarian grounds, or simply because return home is impossible. Where it is determined that a child would not be at risk in the country of origin and a decision is made to return the child, this needs careful preparation. There has to be certainty that the child will receive appropriate care on return and not be left wandering alone around the airport in Istanbul or Accra or Cairo, for instance. Some countries have established systems or programs for the return of separated children, but most have not. And in many cases, the children simply go underground after their asylum claims are turned down, in an effort to avoid being sent home. Little is known about the fate of these young people, who are clearly the most vulnerable of all.

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