He Vice President of the Government of the Canary Islandss, Manuel Dominguez (PP), denied this Saturday that unaccompanied migrant minors are or will be in a situation of abandonment, and guaranteed that the Regional Executive would comply with the instructions of the Prosecutor’s Office.
All this in relation to the decree announced this Friday by the Superior Prosecutor’s Office of the Canary Islands and in which it warns that it will identify those “people from the General Directorate of Child Protection of the Government of the Canary Islands” who are protected from the reception in its centers of children arriving in Cayuco in the new protocol approved by the autonomous community and will investigate whether they have committed a crime of abandonment of minors or another type.
In statements to the media before chairing a meeting of the PP’s regional board of directors, accompanied by the party’s national vice-secretary for organization, Carmen Fúnez, Domínguez stressed that what the Canary Islands Executive intends with the new protocol is to “comply with the law.”
That is, “that things stop happening as they have been up until now” and that migrant minors are handed over by the police, not to NGOs, but to a person in charge of the autonomous community and “in an individualized manner”, with a photo, a fingerprint, a name, an identity document, and that we know exactly where this minor is going to go.
Regarding the latter, the Canarian vice-president stressed that “the prosecutor’s office will be able to tell us where we should take these unaccompanied minors and we are fully available to continue caring for these children, I don’t know if they deserve it.” It’s the same thing, but what we will not do is never abandon them.
“Where do we send them? Towards saturated centers? If the prosecutor tells us that we have to send them there, we will never hesitate to do so. Because we do not have more shelters,” Manuel Domínguez reflected.
“Are they better cared for where they are now or in the centres to which they are referred? That is where we will have to agree to then provide the service, the guardianship, the care, the care that the boys and girls who come to our land need,” he added.
Regarding the possible visit of Pope Francis to the Canary Islands, Domínguez recalled that the visit he made to the Vatican a few months ago with the president of the autonomous community, Fernando Clavijo (Canary Coalition), had precisely this objective.
The idea, Domínguez elaborated, is to obtain an “image” with which to “show the world what is the precarious situation that we live” in the archipelago; “to Europe the help that we need” and to the Spanish government “the urgency and the urgency that we suffer.”
If the Pope finally visits the Canary Islands, “we will welcome him with open arms, it would be wonderful news” and would allow “to carry out an action that Italy has carried out in a different, but effective, way with Lampedusa,” he said.
