Greens MP Alexandra Attalidou on Monday called for the new deputy ministry of social welfare to be given a bigger budget to deal effectively with matters relating to the children of refugees and asylum seekers, and specifically unaccompanied minors.
Attalidou, in a statement after the House human rights committee meeting, which was discussing the issue of 14 unaccompanied minors who have disappeared over the last four years, said there needed to be more coordination between ministries.
Today we discussed the issue of 14 children who are missing, children who have disappeared, either from Pournara or from other facilities, she said, adding that the interior ministry, which runs the facilities, needed to cooperate more with police.
What is needed is the new deputy ministry of social welfare to be given the budget, the means and the staff so that it can deal effectively with these children.
Attalidou said all services must address this issue. We are talking about children, children who are vulnerable, regardless of whether they are entitled to asylum or not. They are children and they are vulnerable.
She said there were 18,000 missing children across Europe and there are fears that they have fallen into the hands of traffickers. Cyprus must do everything it can to find the 14 children, she said, adding that police told MPs they had evidence that some of these children had left Cyprus or had gone to the north.
Attalidou said Cyprus police must continue working with Europol and Interpol and other international organisations they find information on their whereabouts.
She suggested a good way of reducing the danger to unaccompanied minors was to launch campaigns in other countries with announcements and notices in airports and schools to let them know that arriving in Cyprus does not automatically mean they are entitled to asylum so they wont leave their families and be exploited by traffickers or in the end be returned to where they came from.
Authorities said recently they were working on amending the procedures followed for unaccompanied minors.
To date, nine boys and five girls who arrived on the island unaccompanied seeking asylum have gone missing since 2019 according to police data. Most, nine, went missing from accommodations in Nicosia, another three from Larnaca and two from Limassol.
Police have said locating them will be extremely difficult due to the limited information they have on them.
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