UK organizations call for independent probe into missing migrant children

BY|infomigrants

More than 100 associations have demanded the British government to conduct “an urgent independent investigation” over the scores of missing child asylum seekers. The children were kept in hotels which the organizations slammed as “unsafe.”

More than 100 organizations, including the Refugee Council and The Children’s Society, wrote to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday (January 26), demanding an independent inquiry into 200 unaccompanied minors who disappeared from government-approved hotel accommodation.

The organizations said they wanted to “express deep concern” for the missing children, “targeted by criminal networks and (who) are now at risk of exploitation and other forms of significant harm.”

They called for an “immediate” end to hotel accommodation programs for unaccompanied minors, slamming them “unsafe.”

“While the Ministry of the Interior had initially qualified the use of hotels for unaccompanied children as an ’emergency’ measure to be implemented for ‘the shortest possible period,’ this measure has been maintained for 18 months,” they wrote.

Nearly two years have passed since the beginning of the use of hotel accommodation for migrants, which is “both illegal and dangerous” they said, adding it is no longer possible to justify their use as “temporary.”

Who are the missing migrant children?
Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick told lawmakers on Tuesday that more than 200 children under 18 were missing.

Among the missing migrants, 13 are under 16 years old, only one is a female, and 88% of them are Albanian, with the rest coming from Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Vietnam, Pakistan and Turkey.

Jenrick said of the 4,600 child asylum seekers who had arrived in the UK since July 2021, 440 had gone missing and only half had returned.

He said it was “extremely concerning” but added he had not seen evidence the children were being abducted.

What are the organizations demanding the UK government?
In the request to Sunak, the organizations demanded that “the children are taken care of by social services of local authorities, according to the law and with all the guarantees that this implies.”

They also called for “an urgent independent investigation.”

“This is a national failure of child protection,” said Patricia Durr, chair of the anti-child trafficking organization ECPAT UK.

“This is the shocking but inevitable consequence of the Home Office’s practice of directly housing unaccompanied children outside a legal framework,” Durr added.

The conservative government has been criticized in recent months for the poor conditions of its overcrowded migrant reception centers.