The Canary Islands High Prosecutor’s Office has warned the Government of the Canary Islands that it will not allow migrant minors arriving on the Islands to not be received by care centres after the publication of the protocol this Thursday, which allows the Executive to “check” whether the care centres have enough places and increases bureaucracy in the reception of unaccompanied foreign children.
In a decree published this Friday, the Attorney General of the Canary Islands, María Farnés Martínez, gives instructions to the archipelago’s prosecutors on how to act if a state security force or body informs them of the “refusal of the General Directorate of Child Protection” to accommodate a migrant minor in a center of the Autonomous Community when the latter has been “duly examined” in accordance with the national protocol of 2014.
The government of Fernando Clavijo (CC) published this Thursday in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands (BOC) a protocol that details how it intends to act from now on in the face of the “disorder” that, according to it, is generated by the fact that the police hand over children who arrive by boat directly to the centers without detailed identification and without following the prescribed procedures, thus endangering their rights, according to them.
This new instruction requires that the minor arrives perfectly identified and identified, that he has been heard and questioned to know if he is a candidate for shelter or asylum, that the State treats each case individually and that the Public Prosecutor’s Office intervenes if there are doubts about his age; and all this, before transferring him to a center of the autonomous community, provided that it confirms that he has places.
According to this circular from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office understands that the frame of reference for determining whether the minor has been correctly handed over to the authority responsible for his guardianship is the protocol approved in 2014, under the government of Mariano Rajoy, by the Ministries of Justice, Interior, Social Services and Foreign Affairs, as well as by the Office of the Attorney General of the State itself.
If the prosecutor on duty on each island receives a notice from the police stating that a government centre in the Canary Islands does not accept a minor who has arrived on the coast without being accompanied by a family member, he will send a letter to the General Directorate of Child Protection asking for “the necessary measures to be adopted” so that he is received “immediately” in the protection centre that he considers appropriate.
At the same time, he will instruct the Police to provide him with food and accommodation “until he is collected by the General Directorate, or the centre where he should be admitted is indicated, or, in accordance with the protocol, he is delivered” to the Autonomous Police of the Canaries, in which case the duration of the stay of said minor in the police premises must be controlled.
The Attorney General of the Canary Islands also orders that the Police be asked for a detailed report on the personal situation of this minor, his state of health and the progress of his journey to reach the Islands, with details on the number of days he spent at sea or if one of his companions died.
Furthermore, the duty prosecutor “will identify in detail the people from the General Directorate of Child Protection who either do not respond to calls, or are content with not having the capacity to accommodate said minors, or who are not going to take charge of them on the basis of the protocol published on September 12, 2024 in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands.”
The purpose of all this, the instruction adds, is that then the prosecutors specialized in immigration or human trafficking “must initiate the corresponding pre-procedural investigation procedure in the event of the possible commission of an offense of abandonment of minors, without prejudice to any other offenses that may arise.” appear during the investigation.”
