European rights court condemns France, Greece for treatment of child migrants
PARIS: A European court on Thursday condemned France and Greece for their treatment of child migrants and refugees in two separate cases dating to early 2016.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered France to pay 15,000 euros ($17,123) in compensation to an Afghan child who spent about six months in the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais.
It also ordered Greece to pay 4,000 euros each to nine teenagers, six of them from Syria, who had been held in border guard and police cells for several weeks after arriving in the country.
The Afghan child who took the case against France had been living in the southern part of the Jungle in February 2016 when authorities started demolishing the informal migrant camp.
A court ordered the government to place the then 12-year-old in care, but the order was never followed up on.
The child, who had been living in a hut since September, ended up in a makeshift shelter in the remaining northern zone.
A few weeks later, he managed to cross illegally into Britain, where he had been hoping to claim asylum since leaving conflict-torn Afghanistan in late August 2015.
The case against Greece was taken by nine young people, including six Syrians, two Iraqis and a Moroccan, who arrived in the country in early 2016.
Tens of thousands of refugees, mostly from conflict-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, were arriving monthly in Greece from Turkey at the time. Weeks later, an agreement between the European Union and Turkey all but ended the arrivals.
The nine, aged between 14 and 17 at the time according to the court, were held in cells in police and border guard stations for between 21 and 33 days before being transferred to a reception centre. The ECHR said conditions in the police and border guard stations were unsuitable for lengthy detention, especially for minors.