Landing in Dover. The immigration process undergone by unaccompanied children arriving in Kent
- Document number
- 2885
- Date
- 2012
- Title
- Landing in Dover. The immigration process undergone by unaccompanied children arriving in Kent
- Author/publisher
- Office of the Children's Commissioner, United Kingdom
- Availability
- View/save PDF version of this document
- Document type(s)
- Research/Study/Analysis,
- Keywords
- Child Trafficking, Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, Corporate social responsibility, Multi-stakeholder partnerships: Best Interests Principle, Child Victims of Trafficking, Separated Migrant Children, Unaccompanied minors, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Child protection systems,
- Summary
- During the course of this investigation we were given a document entitled the `Gentleman's Agreement' by UKBA staff as part of a pack providing details of the policies and procedures guiding the operations around entry. Further enquiries (with which UKBA cooperated fully) clarified that children who did not register a claim for asylum at the point of entry faced a real risk of being returned immediately to France under the terms of the Agreement. The practice of returning children from the border in this manner conflicts with the duty to safeguard children and promote their welfare. We know of at least seven children who experienced this in 2010 and it is likely that there were others. When I wrote to the Chief Executive of UKBA highlighting this significant failure of child protection he acted swiftly and decisively to end the practice. Our correspondence on the issue is contained as an annex to this report. It appears to us that the immigration process applied to unaccompanied children arriving at Dover has been structured around the tight timescales codified in the ‘Gentleman's Agreement'. Now that children are no longer returned in this way, there appears to be no significant barrier to UKBA changing its procedures at ports such as Dover to bring them into line with their duty to safeguard children and promote their welfare and with their stated policy on the circumstances under which unaccompanied children can be detained.
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