Children in Migration, figures from 2019

In 2019, over 140,000 migrants were apprehended after crossing the EU’s external land or sea borders in an unauthorised manner. Among them, about 33,000 claimed to be children, including over 5,000 who were unaccompanied.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has recently published the annual report 2019 on Children in Migration.

Since September 2015 FRA has collected data on this specific issue and this year’s report covers the main concerns identified in FRA’s Quarterly Bulletins on migration in selected EU Member States (precisely Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands).

The report contains relevant data as the numbers of children arrived in Europe and key findings on the main challenges concerning the fundamental rights of children in migration throughout the entire process from the entering in the EU to the risk of detention and return.

A paragraph is dedicated to guardianship systems for unaccompanied migrant children reaffirming once again that despite significant progress, important gaps remain to be filled.

In the document only four cases are mentioned as example (Croatia, Greece, Hungary and Malta) but the Guardianship system is widespread within many other European Countries and all of them share the need for improvement in order to guarantee a better care and better chances for Unaccompanied migrant children.

The report can be read and downloaded on the FRA’s website