The Ministry of Youth and Childhood will meet with the autonomous communities this Monday to discuss and approve the terms in which the relocation of unaccompanied migrant minors from tense areas such as the Canary Islands and Ceuta to other regions will take place.
The objective of this Sectoral Conference on Childhood and Adolescence, convened extraordinarily and which will take place at the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory from 4:00 p.m., is to move forward with an agreement on different points, aligned with the royal decree law approved by the Government, which was validated by Congress on April 10.
According to the proposal that the Ministry brings to this meeting, to which EFE has had access, the key issues of the mechanism created by the Government will be addressed, which will involve the transfer of some 4,400 children, most of them from the Canary Islands, during the first year and from the summer.
The royal decree law empowers the Sectoral Conference to change various aspects of the decree if it approves it unanimously, which is unlikely, since there are major differences between regions on this issue, especially those governed by the PP, some of which have appealed the Executive's decree before the Constitutional Court.
The meeting is expected to be tense, since Aragon appealed last Friday against the very convocation of the Sectoral Conference, considering that it derives from the royal decree law for the relocation of minors, and the Community of Madrid asked the minister by letter to cancel it, considering it "illegal".
The same text specifies that, in the event that there is no unanimous agreement to the contrary, the Government will continue with the redistribution mechanism under the terms established by the decree.
Duty of reception according to the population
One of the key aspects of this model is that, for the first time, it sets how many minors each community must receive, with a formula based on the total number of young people who are being taken in in the country and the population of each region, which the text calls the "ordinary capacity" of each territory.
This first step has already caused some problems, since Aragon has not provided data on how many unaccompanied foreign young people it is taking in and has appealed this requirement before the Courts, and others, such as Madrid, have not provided exactly what was requested, so the Executive is working with its own data.
Migratory contingency with triple the occupancy and distribution criteria
The proposal to be debated on Monday establishes that any community may ask the Government to declare a situation of migratory contingency in its region when its occupancy exceeds three times its ordinary capacity.
Once this situation is declared, any unaccompanied foreign minor located in this territory will be registered in the Registry of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors, which is managed by the Ministry of the Interior.
And, from then on and regardless of whether there is certainty about their minority or not, the young person will be transferred to another region in 15 days, according to the established criteria, after both the young person and the destination community have been heard and the Public Prosecutor's Office has been informed.
The criteria proposed by the Government - and which will be applied if the communities do not approve otherwise unanimously in the sectoral conference - are the following: population (50%), per capita income (13%), unemployment rate (15%), reception effort (6%), structural dimensioning of the system (10%), population dispersion (2%) and the singularities of border city (2%) and insularity (2%).
Extension of the system for one year
The Government's proposal includes a final point, which determines that the ordinary capacity of the protection system may only be extended for one year, by royal decree and after a report from the Sectoral Conference on Childhood and Adolescence.
Afterwards, the unanimous agreement of the Sectoral Conference or, failing that, an absolute majority of the Congress of Deputies will be required, following a proposal from the Government.
And it makes clear one last aspect: from the first year of extension, without unanimous agreement of the Sectoral Conference on the ordinary capacity of the protection systems, the resolutions of the State derived from the law on the relocation of minors will not be binding on the communities.
