Refugees: Greek Islands

(asked on 15th May 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to facilitate the resettlement of unaccompanied refugee minors from the Greek islands.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 26th May 2020

Protecting vulnerable children remains a key priority of this Government and we have a proud record of doing so through our asylum system and our resettlement schemes.

The UK remains fully committed to meeting its obligations under the Dublin III Regulation, and unaccompanied children can continue to transfer to the UK from Greece under Dublin. The Regulation makes it clear that once a take charge request has been accepted for an unaccompanied child, the transfer is the responsibility of the requesting State. Despite covid-19 restrictions, the UK is ready to accept transfers under Dublin whenever Member States are in a position to make those arrangements. We recently worked closely with Greece to complete the transfer of vulnerable people, including unaccompanied children, on 11 May who were united with family members in the UK. We continue to liaise with our counterparts in Member States on what actions can be taken during this period and to effect transfers as soon as it is safe and practical to do so.

The Home Office publishes data on the Dublin III Regulation on an annual basis (each February) in the Immigration Statistics. This includes data on the number of requests to transfer into and out of the UK and the number acceptances and transfers into and out of, broken down by article and Member State requesting. The latest data, covering up to 2019, can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/asylum-and-resettlement-datasets#dublin-regulation

Instructions on how to use the data can be found in the ‘Notes’ sheet.

The Government remains committed to relocating the specified number of 480 unaccompanied children from Europe to the UK under Section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016 (‘the Dubs amendment’). Over 220 children were transferred to the UK under section 67 when the Calais camp was cleared in late 2016. Since then we have continued to make further progress with participating States including Greece, to move closer to achieving this commitment and we will publish the current number of transfers under section 67 on 21 May 2020 along with the publication of the quarterly immigration statistics.

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