Statewatch News Online: France/Romania: Agreement to repatriate unaccompanied Romanian minors ratified
28 March 2012
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France/Romania 
Agreement
to repatriate unaccompanied Romanian minors ratified
As the French
government announced in the wake of president Sarkozy's controversial
statements about Roma people and illegal camps in July 2010,
presenting it as one of the key points in its plan to tackle
the problem, the French Assemblée Nationale (the lower
house of parliament) ratified the bilateral agreement for the
return of unaccompanied Romanian minors to their home country
on 7 October 2010 (see StatewatchJournal, vol. 20 no 2).
Hors de la Rue, an association that works to support unaccompanied
minors in difficult situations, has been a longstanding critic
of the agreement (see Statewatch News Online, September 2008)
and released a statement on the ratification of this instrument
which claims that it "betrays the rights of minors"
by shifting the priority from protecting minors to managing migration
flows. The association highlights that in spite of it being portrayed
as "agreements for the protection of unaccompanied Romanian
minors in France", the agreement does not offer any guarantee
of additional protection, but rather, it is "an obstacle
for the protection of children" because it suppresses the
requirement for a prior social inquiry concerning a child's circumstances
to enable a repatriation to be carried out and responsibility
for the procedure is transferred from the minors' judge to the
public prosecutor, in a text that is described as "arising
from the wish to make expulsion procedures more automatic and
less independent". The ratification is described as betraying
the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and the
French Constitution (some opposition MPs have seized the constitutional
court with this matter) because:
"while the problem
of unaccompanied minors requires a treatment in which the protection
of a child must prevail over any other consideration, we feel
that these agreements enshrine a purely administrative approach
which risks harming some minors who are already in a dangerous
situation".
On 27 August 2010, Hors de la Rue had issued a statement
in which it described the effects that the government's rhetoric
had had on Roma children, of which it estimated that there were
7,000 in France, whose "health, social and educational situation…
has been a cause for concern for a long time". It argued
that the stigmatisation and harrassment that followed Sarkozy's
statements had "devastating" effects on the Roma minors
that they dealt with in their centre in Montreuil: "fear,
with important psychological effects, drives these unaccompanied
minors to hide and, in some cases, to interrupt their reintegration
process". On 31 August, on the day after ministers Hortefeux
and Besson had raised the issue of Romanian minors in the context
of the drive against illegal Roma and gens du voyage (traveller)
camps, the association criticised the "exploitation of the
dramatic situations of minors on French territory in the name
of the fight against crime", dismissing the agreement as
a way of "eluding the obligations connected to the protection
fo children".
Sources
"De
la protection de l'enfance à la gestion des flux migratoires",
Hors de la Rue press statement, 7.10.10
"Accords
Franco-Roumains : Le gouvernement s'apprête à bafouer
les droits de l'enfant", Hors de la Rue press
statement, 31.8.10
"Roms:
derrière les effets d'annonce, les enfants …",
Hors de la Rue press statement, 27.8.10,
Previous Statewatch
coverage
France/Romania:
Ratification of agreement to increase repatriations of unaccompanied
minors underway,
Statewatch News Online, September 2008, analyses the text
of agreement and includes links to the text of the Franco-Romanian
agreement, a dossier by Hors de la Rue and the draft ratification
law
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