Spain has agreed to temporarily transfer 500 vulnerable minors to its mainland from Ceuta, three days after the EU Commission joined rightwing Spanish politicians in calls for all migrants there to be sent back to Morocco.
The fate of migrant children sleeping on Ceuta’s streets in their thousands has been the subject of polarising debate in Madrid: One one hand, Spanish law mandates automatic state protection of unaccompanied minors, but on the other hand, a rightwing-dominated parliament has called for all irregular arrivals to be returned.
And the EU weighed into the toxic situation on Monday (18 August), taking the side of the right.
“The expectation is that all those who remain in Ceuta illegally will be returned,” commission spokesperson Markus Lammert said, referring specifically to the unaccompanied children and teenagers still in Spain’s North African enclave.
But Lammert’s views aside, the Spanish Immigration Act says such minors ought to be placed under the care of the child-protection services of the autonomous community where they arrived.
Spain’s interior ministry said there were 2,500 children in that situation in Ceuta since 30 July, when tens of thousands of people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, entered the enclave.
Charity Save the Children estimated the figure was 4,000 and said most of them were sleeping on the streets, due to lack of space in child-reception facilities.
Even using the smaller Spanish number, that was still “75 times more than the city’s capacity can take on, which is designed to accommodate only 29 minors,” a spokesperson from the Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR) told EUobserver.
And so Madrid is negotiating with regional authorities on the Spanish mainland to take on the care of some of them, starting with 500 of those in the most vulnerable situations, most of whom are young girls.
Ceuta is still expected to accommodate 500 minors, despite its limited resources.