The moment I arrived at the branch office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Rome, almost 30 years ago, the news came in about a group of Sri Lankan unaccompanied and undocumented boys stranded at Fiumicino Airport. Arrangements were quickly made to get the boys to the UNHCR office to have their cases examined by skilled protection officers.

The main scope of my visit to the UNHCR office on that particular morning was to get more direct experience in interviewing difficult cases of adult asylum seekers. However, in view of the Sri Lankan boys’ arrival, I changed course. That morning I had my first experience in the particularly arduous task of interviewing unaccompanied minors.

The boys’ stories were more or less analogous. They were all victims of the civil war in their country, which had been going on since 1983. Fighters were abducting boys to enslave them, train them in gun handling, force them into joining the struggle, or otherwise engage them in money-generating activities like drug trading. Many, many children were disappearing, never to be seen alive again.

Parents started selling anything of value they might have had to hand over their children, against heavy payments, to persuasive human smugglers who promised to take the boys to a safe country. The smugglers, on their part, had their own devious ways of doing whatever was needed to get the children on a plane to countries like Italy and, upon arrival, disappear and leave the penniless boys to their faith at the airport.

In front of us at the UNHCR we had a group of minors who were defenceless in a threefold way: they were children, they were foreigners, and they had no means to protect themselves.

The boys were deemed to have a well-founded case for international protection and UNHCR took them under its wings.

Migrant children easily end up at the lowest levels of human degradation

This initial experience came to my mind, along with so many other later cases of unaccompanied boat-children reaching Malta, when I read the Holy Father’s message for today’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees, entitled ‘Child Migrants, the Vulnerable and the Voiceless’.

Pope Francis draws attention to “the reality of child migrants, especially the ones who are alone”, asking all to take care of the young who are defenceless, “forced to live far from their homeland and separated from their families”.

He fittingly describes such children as the most vulnerable because they are “invisible and voiceless”, considering that their precarious situation deprives them of documentation and hides them from the world’s eye.

The Pope says the Gospel speaks of the responsibility and of the evil of those who work against mercy by harming young girls and boys. In his mind he has the children who, today, “are led into prostitution or into the mire of pornography; who are enslaved as child labourers or soldiers; who are caught up in drug trafficking and other forms of criminality; who are forced to flee from conflict and persecution, risking isolation and abandonment.”

Knowing very well that migrant children easily end up at the lowest levels of human degradation, where illegality and violence destroy the future of too many innocents, the Pope makes a powerful appeal for action against those who profit from the exploitation of children with the adoption of adequate policies aimed at assistance and inclusion.

Francis rightly urges leaders who implement the right of States to control migratory movement and to protect the common good of the nation to do so in conjunction with the duty to resolve and regularise the situation of child migrants, fully respecting their dignity and seeking to meet their needs.

At the end of a year which saw a record of 5,000 people, many of them children, vanishing into the depths of the Mediterranean as 364,000 migrants crossed this sea to Europe during 2016, the Pope again appeals for long-term solutions. Indeed, it remains absolutely necessary to effectively deal with the causes that trigger migrations in the countries of origin, starting with a convincing international commitment to eliminate the conflicts and violence that force people to flee.

cphbuttigieg@gmail.com

Charles Buttigieg was Malta’s first Commissioner for Refugees.

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