Spain, Greece and Hungary have been rebuked by courts for failing to protect the rights of children.
It adds to a string of recent rulings that have reprimanded countries across Europe over the treatment of lone minors who are seeking asylum.
Spain’s supreme court ruled that the government’s decision to deport hundreds of Moroccan youths, after a 2021 mass border crossing into the enclave of Ceuta, was illegal.
The unaccompanied children were among thousands of people who crossed into the seven-square mile territory as Madrid and Rabat argued over the status of the Western Sahara.
Months later, around 700 youths were sent back to Morocco. The court said that the exceptional circumstances of the mass crossing did not warrant the deportations, ruling instead that the collective expulsions amounted to a breach of the country’s domestic immigration laws and the European convention on human rights.
The leftist coalition government had failed to consider the interest of the minors or verify their individual circumstances, the court noted, meaning the children were “put in serious danger of suffering physical or psychological harm”.
As the deportations loomed in 2021, the Spanish broadcaster RTVE spoke to 10 children, all of them between the ages of 13 and 16, who said they had fled state care and were now living rough amid fears of being deported.
“We would be worse off than we are here,” one child told the broadcaster, as others said authorities had not asked them about their individual circumstances or where they would go.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s interior minister, defended the deportations, saying that the authorities had acted “with the full conviction of complying with the legal system and guided by the principle of the best interests of the child”.
The ruling was made days after the European court of human rights (ECHR) said Hungary had violated the rights of a 16-year-old Iraqi Kurd asylum seeker after police pushed him back into the Serbian wilderness.
The boy said he had told police that he wanted to request asylum, the court noted. “The court cannot ignore that at the time of his removal the applicant was an unaccompanied minor, and therefore in a situation of extreme vulnerability,” it added, noting that the age of asylum seekers “should take precedence” over the child’s status as an irregular migrant.
The ruling was welcomed by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the NGO that had helped to lodge the case. “The Hungarian state treats children in need of asylum this way,” it said in a statement.
“Instead of deporting children without due process, it would be much better for everyone if Hungary were to review asylum applications under a fair asylum system. Because the Hungarian government has been causing suffering and harm for years,” it added.
A decision published by the ECHR on Tuesday also condemned Greece for failing to protect the rights of a teenage asylum seeker who was left homeless for nearly six months starting in November 2018.
In its ruling, the court noted that the asylum seeker, from Afghanistan, “had been left to fend for himself in an environment that was entirely unsuitable for minors – whether in terms of security, accommodation, hygiene or access to food and care, or in terms of the measures taken to provide for him more generally – and in unacceptably precarious circumstances, given his status as an asylum seeker and unaccompanied minor”.
At the end of 2020, at the urging of the UN, the Greek government ushered in new mechanisms aimed at better protecting unaccompanied children. “The majority of them are now staying in official shelters,” it noted in a 2021 report.
The rulings are the latest pronouncements by the courts over how European countries have treated lone child asylum seekers.
Similar decisions, however, stretch back years and involve several countries; in 2019, for example, the ECHR ruled that France had subjected an 11-year-old asylum seeker to inhuman or degrading treatment by failing to provide care for him.
He instead lived in a shantytown in Calais in what the court described as “overcrowded conditions without even the most basic sanitation”.
The environment, it added, was “completely unsuited to his status as a child and in a situation of insecurity rendered unacceptable by his young age”.
Last month a British high court order banned the UK’s Home Office from routinely placing unaccompanied child asylum seekers in hotels. Since June 2021, more than 400 children had gone missing from asylum hotels. Officials recently told a parliamentary committee that 132 of them remain missing.
