UN wants Trudeau to push G7 on refugee kids

OTTAWA The United Nations children’s agency is urging Justin Trudeau to press his fellow G7 leaders to do more to help vulnerable and isolated refugee children who face rampant sexual and physical abuse.

A senior UNICEF official wants the prime minister to push for progress on a serious aspect of the global refugee crisis — children travelling alone without adult supervision — while in Sicily later this month for the G7 summit.

“The Canadian government and the prime minister have spoken out very strongly on two big issues: one is around refugees and migrants and secondly, is around women and girls,” said UN Assistant Secretary General Justin Forsyth, the deputy executive director of UNICEF.

All G7 countries need to do more to address the exploitation of children crossing the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, Forsyth said in an interview.

Ninety per cent of children making that journey are classified as “unaccompanied” and face no end of misery, including sexual slavery and detention during their flight, and further discrimination in some European countries, he noted.

Trudeau’s “impressive leadership” on Syrian refugees and his development focus on helping women and girls in poor countries give him the political capital to push his fellow leaders to accept and help settle more unaccompanied child migrants, he said.

Forsyth singled out Britain and France as two countries that need to do more, citing the ongoing internal political debates in both as obstacles to progress.

“In all of these countries there are very strong debates around migrants and refugees. We’ve seen it in France, we’ve seen it in Britain and they’re big political discussions,” he said.

“What we’re saying is strip that politics back and let’s have a humanitarian response.”

The pro-Brexit forces that persuaded the British population to vote to leave the European Union last year argued that their country’s borders needed to be closed to the flow of refugees in Europe.

The recent French election gave profile to the anti-immigration policies of far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who was eventually defeated.

And Donald Trump has tried to ban migrants from a number of mainly Muslim countries from entering the United States, triggering a pitched legal battle between the White House and the U.S. judiciary.

Trump, along with British Prime Minister Theresa May and France’s president-elect Emmanuel Macron, will be making their G7 debuts later this month — making Trudeau one of the group’s elder statesmen after 18 months in office.