Athens – Francois Crepeau, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, has urged Greece to stop detaining refugee and migrant children.
Crepeau who is on a fact-finding mission in Greece from May 12 to 16, said on Monday in Athens that instead of locking them up in police cells for weeks, they should develop child protection services instead.
He said he had met unaccompanied children held in police stations for more than two weeks without access to the outdoors, and traumatised and distressed by the experience.
Crepeau said others were with their families in overcrowded detention centres, where inter-communal frictions and contradictory information created an unacceptable level of confusion, frustration, violence and fear.
“Detention should only be ordered when people present a risk, a danger, a threat to the public and it has to be a documented threat, it cannot simply be a hunch.”
Crepeau said children and families should be offered alternatives to detention.
He urged authorities to develop a substantial and effective guardianship system for unaccopanied minors and increase the shelter capacity for them.
Crepeau said more than a million migrants, many fleeing the Syrian war, have arrived in Europe through Greece since last year.
“More than 150,000 have arrived in 2016 so far, 38 per cent of them children. (Reuters/NAN)
