The President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, met this Tuesday with the Minister of Integration, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, at the headquarters of the Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Miguel Barreto (EFE)
The Government of the Canary Islands wants to accelerate as much as possible the legislative reforms aimed at changing the reception model for unaccompanied foreign minors arriving in Spain. The law stipulates that the care and guardianship of minors – foreign or not – is the responsibility of the autonomous communities, but for five years the regions that receive the most children and young people have been rebelling against a system that forces them to have disproportionate numbers of children and young people to accommodate minors. compared to other. For several years now, the Canary Islands have been leading this demand, and in recent months with even more emphasis: the archipelago is the destination of 70% of all irregular arrivals and already welcomes almost 4,400 children. “We need rapid change. We must clear the way for the upcoming legal changes, even if the procedures become slower later,” explains Canarian President Fernando Clavijo of the Canarian Coalition to EL PAÍS. “Under the current conditions, we cannot guarantee these minors a life project. “We can’t even educate them.”
Clavijo met this Tuesday in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with the Minister of Migration Elma Saiz and emphasized the urgency of these changes to the law. He did it with a promise that was already on the table. The legal change (without elaborating) to regulate the distribution of migrant children was one of the commitments that the PSOE made with the Canary Islands coalition to carry out the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The agreement literally states: “Starting the process that will culminate in the necessary regulatory changes to ensure that the powers of unaccompanied foreign minors are not the exclusive responsibility of the municipalities where they arrive.” For her part, the minister told journalists : “The government sticks to what it signs.” But the path that has been taken again and again in recent years is not easy.
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Initiatives to improve care for migrant children have been undertaken over the years, but have met with little success. The best thing that has been achieved in the last five years has been a response plan in which the Autonomous Communities have committed to distributing 400 minors arriving in Ceuta and the Canary Islands in 2022 and 2023. “It is not enough,” as Clavijo complains several times, but a milestone considering that the Autonomous Communities have always been reluctant to receive foreign minors who arrived in other territories. For example, in this distribution, which took into account the population, unemployment or the number of minors already received, La Rioja received 36 minors; Galicia, 35; Catalonia and Madrid, another 30 children; Andalusia, 28 and Castilla y León, 28. The least expected was that Navarre had a quota of 15 minors.
Current legislation establishes that the Autonomous Communities are responsible for the protection of children. This should not be an obstacle to ensuring that the initial reception system for these children is the joint responsibility of all public administrations, including the State, which can also help finance it. The key is which law or laws are changed and how this problem can be addressed. And it's not clear. Both the immigration law, the asylum law and the comprehensive child protection law affect this group.
Canary Islands government sources say their legal team is working on a proposal to change the law, which they hope to have ready and send to Madrid by January 15th. The intention of the Canary Islands is, in principle, to amend the immigration law, “add an article defining the responsibility of the State” and advance it through a legislative decree. Sources who worked in youth protection in various institutions consider this alternative to be impractical. “It could be achieved in March,” the regional board is aiming for. The Canary Islands do not intend to abandon guardianship of minors arriving in their territory, but rather want the state to take over their primary care and distribute them to other communities according to quotas. He also calls for more funding for this cause.
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New protocol
Already in 2019, when the Childhood Observatory was working on a new protocol for the care of foreign minors, the possibility of creating a new regulatory text to create a statute for migrant children and adolescents was raised. In fact, one of the measures put on the table was the creation of centers managed by the state that would receive foreign minors for the first time, study their situation and from there distribute them to the different communities on an equal basis. Autonomous. But nothing that was proposed at the time came off paper.
Aside from the legislative changes and political agreements that will be required to implement them, there is another important problem. The Convention on the Rights of the Child makes it clear that the status of an immigrant must not take precedence over that of a minor, meaning that foreign children must enjoy the same rights and protections as any other child. Neither Migration nor the Ministry of Youth and Children have explained to EL PAÍS what legislative options they are using to finally address the problem.
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