The Belgian state has violated the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2018 and 2019, according to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. In concrete terms, this concerns two cases in which migrant children, once together with their mother and once with both parents, were locked up in a closed centre. Eleven NGOs, including Unicef and Caritas, reported this in a joint press release on Monday.
The asylum application of the children was rejected and they were locked up for weeks in detention center 127bis in Steenokkerzeel. But this violated Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
That article requires the states that have ratified the treaty, including our country, that “no child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily”. “The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in accordance with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.” In addition, the article also states that children who have been deprived of their liberty are treated with “humanity and respect for dignity”.
In its opinion, the Committee on the Rights of the Child emphasizes that Belgium “has not considered any alternative to the detention of the children” and thus “neither at the time of their detention nor at the time of the extension of their detention has duly taken into account their interests as a primary consideration”.
127bis
By re-establishing units for families in 127bis in July 2018, Belgium “re-introduced a practice it had stopped years earlier: detaining children because of their migration status or that of their parents”, according to the eleven organisations.
Between the summer of 2018, when the Michel government started using these separate units, and April 2019, when the Council of State again ended the detention of minors, 20 children were detained there, according to the organizations.
The group of NGOs uses the findings of the UN committee to argue that a ban on detaining children is clearly enshrined in Belgian law. The current government has already committed to not detaining children under her rule, but the NGOs are asking for “a clear and – let us hope – sustainable signal”.
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