Belgium More respect for children rights, please!

November 21, 2007

Frame :

To detain a child because of the illegal status of his/her parents is disproportionate and severely affects the development of the child

Comment: More than 35 child rights organizations and professionnals in Belgium take the occasion of the 18th anniversary of the UNCRC to protest against the detention of foreign minors because of the illegal status of their parents.

The daily 'La Libre Belgique' publishes on one full page the declaration of the child rights activists and illustrates the article with a drawing showing a child with the clothes of a detainee. The background is a map of Belgium with the words of the UNCRC.

The authors illustrates their statement with recent cases of young children, aged 7 to 13, being jailed with their mother. One family, from Congo, stayed 17 days in detention before being released, the second family remained 79 days in custody before being deported to Ukraine on the 4th of November. Born in Belgium, the eleven years old boy does not know Ukraine…

The group of child protection professionals indicates that in 2006, 700 children faced the same violations of their rights, and the coalition denounces these violations comparing them with the priorities of the government on its migration policy. The authors quote several times a recent study ordered by the Ministry of Interior about alternatives to detention for families with children. The article quotes also the declaration of the Flemish Commissioner for Children Rights requesting that “foreign minors, accompanied or not, to not be detained anymore”.

If such denunciation is published by one of the main newspapers of Belgium the day after the 18th anniversary of the UNCRC, the detention of foreign minors as illegal migrants is unfortunately widely spread in Europe. This practice is in full contradiction with the Convention on Children Rights, while all EU member states ratified this convention.

(Read the original article in French here)