Elected lawmakers in Spain, Greece, and Hungary have this week been scolded by courts, either at home or abroad, over their handling of migration. These separate rulings claim the governments have failed to protect the rights of children.
While children are a minority of those making illegal crossings, pro-migrant campaigners often use them in legal cases to stop governments from achieving their mandate of controlling borders. Administrators often face further difficulty in establishing the actual age of those claiming to be children, with people smugglers “actively briefing” asylum seekers to say they are under 16.
Migration analyst Alp Mehmet, who chairs the Migration Watch UK think tank, told The European Conservative:
This is clearly a Europe-wide problem. Moreover, the more lenient and indulgent our courts are in accepting at face value those claiming to be minors fleeing persecution, the more will come.
Spain’s Supreme Court said the government’s 2021 deportation of 700 youths, who were among a group of around 12,000 attempting to enter from Morocco by scaling a border fence, was illegal.
Officials cited an agreement with Morocco which allowed for assisted returns in the face of “exceptional circumstances,” but were slapped down. Socialist Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska also stressed on Tuesday that they acted “with the full conviction of complying with the legal system and guided by the principle of the best interests of the child.” The court said the deportation was in breach of national laws as well as the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Guardian linked this case with two which followed in Budapest and Athens. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accused both of falling short of their international commitments regarding two separate teenage asylum seekers. Guardian journalists used rather different language when describing the case of each country, writing that Hungary, the case against which was supported by an organisation partly funded by the Soros Foundation, had “violated” the rights of a child; meanwhile, Greece had “[failed] to protect” the rights of another.
ECHR officials have made it clear that they will also be willing to disrupt Britain’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to deter illegal migration across the Channel, should it ever get closer to coming off the ground.
