The European Court of Human Rights has ordered France to pay 15,000 euros ($17,000) to an Afghan migrant for failing to protect him when, as a 12-year-old, he lived alone in a makeshift migrant camp in Calais.

Thursday's decision is limited to the case of Jamil Khan, who spent six months in the squalid camp, one of scores of unaccompanied minors there.

Khan sneaked across the English Channel in March 2016 and now lives in Birmingham.

The Strasbourg court said that it wasn't convinced the French government did all it could to care for and protect the child, as a court had ordered after a lawyers' group filed a complaint on his behalf.

The court ruled authorities had breached Europe's human rights convention forbidding inhuman or degrading treatment.