Refugees: Children

(asked on 2nd March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to facilitate the resettlement of vulnerable child refugees from Greek islands.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 5th March 2020

Under Article 8 of the Dublin Regulation which concerns unaccompanied minors the UK accepted for transfer 196 requests from the Greek authorities between 2016 and 2019. By year this is broken down as follows; 2016 – 10, 2017 – 17, 2018 – 69, and 2019 – 100. The data for 2020 will be published as part of the annual data release on the Dublin regulation and is scheduled for release at the end of 2020.

Under Article 17.2, the discretionary article of the Dublin Regulation allowing Member States to agree responsibility for an asylum claim, the UK accepted a further 81 requests from the Greek Authorities between 2016 and 2019. A proportion of these transfers were unaccompanied children; however, an exact breakdown is not available.

The UK will continue to be bound by the Dublin Regulation provisions during the Transition Period, allowing us to continue to transfer family reunion cases to the UK throughout 2020, and we will continue to process all family reunion requests that have been submitted but not completed under Dublin before the end of the Transition Period.

We will cease to participate in EU instruments at the end of the Transition Period, including the Dublin Regulation. This means that the ability of unaccompanied children to use Dublin to reunite with family will end, unless a replacement agreement is negotiated. The Government has been clear that it is committed to seeking such an agreement with the EU, thereby ensuring these children can continue to reunite with family at the end of the Transition Period. We made this commitment clear in the UK’s approach to negotiations on our future relationship, published on 27 February.

The Government remains fully committed to relocating the specified number of 480 unaccompanied children to the UK under section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016 (the Dubs Amendment) as soon as possible. Over 220 children were transferred to the UK under section 67 when the Calais camp was cleared in late 2016. Since then we have been making further progress with Greece and the other participating states, to transfer more eligible children to move closer to achieving this commitment. We will publish a full data set on the transfers once we have fulfilled this commitment.

Section 67 is just one way in which the Government supports children in need of protection. The Government’s long-standing policy is to provide support to and resettle the most vulnerable refugees directly from conflict regions. In total, the UK provided protection to over 7,700 children in the year ending December 2019, and 42,500 since the start of 2010. In 2019 the UK received 3,651 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children up 19% from 2018.

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