https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/18/teenage-girl-arrives-uk-calais-crisis-eritrea-children-camp
Teenage girl arrives in UK as part of response to Calais crisis
First unaccompanied girl, from Eritrea, and 12 boys are greeted in London as concerns grow about 1,000 children stuck in camp
Amelia Gentleman 19 October 2016
The first female child refugee, a teenager from Eritrea, has arrived in the UK from France along with 12 male refugees aged between 13 and 17 who were due to be reunited with their families as part of the Home Office’s speeded up response to the Calais crisis.
They arrived on the second coach to carry unaccompanied refugee children from Calais to Britain in two days. They were greeted with clapping and cheering by a small crowd outside a Home Office processing centre in Croydon, south London, before being swiftly chaperoned inside by police.
But there was growing cross-party concern from MPs and charities about the fate of the estimated 1,000 unaccompanied child refugees still stuck in the Calais camp, part of which is set for demolition on Wednesday.
In a letter to the home secretary, Amber Rudd, they expressed “deepest concern” for the unaccompanied minors’ and vulnerable people’s safety and welfare amid what they called “inadequate” plans for their future. The letter, signed by Conservative MP Heidi Allen, Labour’s Yvette Cooper, and more than 50 other MPs, requests that “all unaccompanied minors should be removed to a place of safety before demolition begins”. It also requests that a “designated safe area for any remaining minors and vulnerable people” should be created before the eviction starts.
The Kids’ Cafe, where lone migrant children receive free food, has been issued with a demolition notice and volunteers expect that it will be knocked down within the next 48 hours. “It is absolute chaos,” said Mary Jones, who helps to run the cafe. “None of them know where they will be going. It is like taking their home away from them.”
The medical charity Doctors of the World, which has been working with refugees in Calais since 2003, said there was no clear plan for those children not going to the UK.
“We are very concerned for unaccompanied children who aren’t entitled to come here. What will happen to them? Past camp clearances have only caused them more suffering,” Leigh Daynes, executive director of the charity, said. “Dismantling the camp won’t stop refugees coming to Calais nor make the thousands there already disappear. People will just come back only to live in even more squalid conditions in much smaller settlements and squats with fewer facilities, which could badly affect their physical and mental health.”
Daynes added that he hoped the police would act “proportionately” when the main stage of camp demolition begins, “as our medics regularly see refugees who’ve been injured, sometimes seriously, at their hands”. Shops and cafes are expected to be knocked down this week and tents and shacks where asylum-seekers sleep are expected to be destroyed from Monday.
Refugee charities in Calais said the Home Office drive to speed up reunification of child refugees with family in the UK has not been accompanied by any provision for vulnerable children believed to be eligible to travel to Britain under the “Dubs amendment”, which gives an unspecified number of “vulnerable unaccompanied child refugees”, who arrived in the EU before 20 March, the possibility of coming to the UK. French officials are understood to be working in the camp with British officials this week to register children with relatives in Britain, but charities say there is no evidence of any registration process for “Dubs” children.
“We think there are at least 54 unaccompanied girls, mostly Eritrean and a few from Ethiopia and Sudan, the vast majority of whom have no family in the UK, so are only eligible for Dubs,” Liz Clegg, a volunteer, said. “We have only five days left before demolition and there has not been a single mention of Dubs children; we believe they are the most vulnerable children on the site.”
A Home Office spokesperson said there would be no announcement about the quantity of children expected to be transferred to Britain until the process was complete. “Children who may be eligible to come to the UK under the Dubs Amendment to the Immigration Act 2016 must be supported in France while their cases are considered. If it is in the best interests of children who meet the Dubs criteria they will be transferred to the UK,” an official said.
But volunteers said there was no information available about where the potentially eligible children could be rehoused in France. “The registration process is chaotic. We have no information about what will happen to the children when the camp is demolished. The children are in a state of complete confusion,” Mary Jones said.
Laura Griffiths, senior field manager for Safe Passage UK, the charity that has been working to reunite refugee children with relatives, said: “The main concern is that in the chaos children with a right to reunite with family are being missed and no plan is yet in place for the highly vulnerable children who qualify for sanctuary in the UK under Dubs. With demolition potentially just days away there are still well over 1,000 children in the camp.”
Received on Wed Oct 19 2016 - 05:09:51 EDT