European commission says detaining children should be ‘last resort’ in what will seen as a rebuke for member state

Detention of child refugees should be “a last resort”, the European commission has said, in remarks that will be seen as a rebuke to Hungary where asylum seekers, including minors, are being held in barbed-wire fenced camps.

The statement from Brussels is part of a long awaited plan to protect child refugees in Europe. About 386,300 children made an asylum claim in the EU in 2016, a six-fold increase since 2010 that has left some countries struggling to cope.



The EU plan comes one day after Germany announced it was halting refugee transfers to Hungary, until Budapest stops the systematic detention of all asylum seekers.

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Under the EU’s Dublin regulation, asylum seekers are to be returned to the first country they registered in. Routine detention of refugees is banned.

Hungary announced last month that all asylum seekers older than 14 would be kept in converted shipping containers on the border while their claims were assessed. About 110 people were living in the camps, including four unaccompanied children, and children with their families, when the UN refugee agency assessed the camps last week.



The situation for asylum seekers had worsened since the new law came into effect, the UNHCR said, as the organisation also warned of “highly disturbing reports” of police violence meted out to refugees attempting to cross the border.



Věra Jourová, the European commissioner for justice, described child detention as alarming. “The detention of children ... is the last resort solution, this can be used only if it is strictly necessary under exceptional conditions, when there is no other alternative,” she told the Guardian and other European newspapers.



The commission is calling for child protection officers to be appointed in all refugee processing centres to help prevent children falling into the hands of human traffickers or extremists.



Many child asylum seekers are aged between 15 and 18. “This is a group of children who are very vulnerable and could be very easily trapped by jihadist ideology,” Jourová said.

The commission’s support for detaining child asylum seekers in exceptional cases, is opposed by the UNHCR, which says that detention is never in the child’s best interests and that it increases the risk of physical and mental health problems.

Hungary already risks being taken to the European court of justice for failure to take in a mandatory quota of asylum seekers, a decision imposed on Budapest in September 2015. The clock is ticking towards a deadline to disperse 160,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU member states (excluding the UK) by September 2017.

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The EU’s most senior official on migration warned that Hungary risked being taken to the European court of justice if it failed to meet its target. “From September the relocation scheme is ending. This does not mean it is going to die. It will continue,” said Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for home affairs, . “EU countries who do not want to be part of our policy, they will be confronted with measures we can take,” he said, in a coded reference to court action that could land governments with hefty fines.

The commission is anxious to avoid this option, which is likely to lead to years of legal wrangling.

So far 16,548 refugees have been relocated from Greece and Italy, barely 10% of the promised 160,000. In a sign of retreat from the headline goal, the commission said there were fewer candidates for relocation than expected - 14,000 in Greece and 3,500 in Italy - making the less ambitious target “perfectly achievable”.

Avramopoulos visited Budapest last week and said he had raised the commission’s concerns with the authorities. “We are discussing with the Hungarians but we don’t know yet what will be their final answer.”

Save the Children and other NGOs have highlighted the desperate conditions encountered by asylum seekers on the Greek islands, where 14,000 are living in camps. Young children were cutting themselves, attempting suicide and using drugs to cope with “endless misery”, the researchers found.

Ester Asin, director of Save the Children’s Brussels office, welcomed the EU’s new push for child rights. “These are important commitments and we hope they will be endorsed by the member states … it is high time to implement them. Detention is never in the best interest of the child, it is never the solution. We look forward to working with the commission and especially EU member states to develop alternatives to detention.”