Amnesty International has asked the different authorities to guarantee a dignified reception for the minors transferred from the Canary Islands in the face of the "wave of stigmatizing and criminalizing messages based on racist hoaxes" experienced this summer.
This Monday, the Government has initiated the transfer to the peninsula of ten minor asylum seekers -over 16 years of age and from Mali-, in order to comply with the order given to it by the Supreme Court to assume the reception of a thousand of these children and adolescents who request international protection.
In addition to requesting a dignified reception for all of them, Amnesty International has lamented in a statement the "battle" that some autonomous communities maintain with the central government over who takes care of these minors, and has demanded a commitment from the authorities to undertake the transfers "with the greatest speed and firmness".
Their request joins the one formulated by UNICEF Spain in another statement, in which it insists on the need to create "a state multidisciplinary unit to support migrant children in emergencies", which identifies the needs of each minor, and calls on the central Executive to assume a budgetary commitment to guarantee that each community has sufficient resources to welcome them.
It emphasizes that the Government and the communities "have to work in coordination to guarantee the protection of unaccompanied migrant children" and asks that "the best interests" of each minor prevail and that the transfer mechanism be "agile, efficient and guaranteeing".
Amnesty International, for its part, has highlighted that the Government complies with the Supreme Court's order, while denouncing that the Executive has not yet begun to apply the legislative reform that will force the autonomous communities to assume the reception of unaccompanied migrant minors from areas with saturated resources such as the Canary Islands.
This reform establishes, in Amnesty's opinion, "a distribution of responsibility in the reception as a way to find a stable and binding solution".
The head of Research and Internal Policy at Amnesty International Spain, Virginia Álvarez, has once again drawn attention to the mistreatment and saturation reported in some reception centers in the Canary Islands.
In addition, she has demanded a reception system that meets adequate standards throughout the Spanish territory and has recalled that the children "have fled alone, sometimes from war or persecution".
Faced with the "wave of stigmatizing messages and criminalizers based on hoaxes that have occurred this summer", the NGO believes it is "more important than ever to demonstrate that we are a welcoming society that does not tolerate racism".
