The Prosecutor's Office will identify those "people from the General Directorate of Child Protection of the Government of the Canary Islands" who are protected to not take in children who arrived by boat in their centers in the new protocol approved by the autonomous community and will investigate if they have committed a crime of child abandonment or another type.
In a decree released this Friday, the senior prosecutor of the Canary Islands, María Farnés Martínez, gives instructions to the prosecutors of the islands on how to act if any state security force or body informs them of "the refusal of the General Directorate of Child Protection" to take in a minor immigrant in a center of the autonomous community when they have been "duly identified" in accordance with the national protocol of 2014.
The Government of Fernando Clavijo published this Thursday in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands a protocol that details how it intends to act from now on in the face of the "disorder" that it believes is generated by the fact that the Police deliver children arriving by boat directly to the centers without a detailed identification and without complying with the agreed procedures, putting their rights at risk, in their opinion.
This protocol requires that the minor arrives perfectly identified and with their information, that they have been listened to and interviewed to find out if they are a candidate for refuge or asylum, that the State processes each file individually and that the Prosecutor's Office intervenes if there are doubts about their age; and all this, before transferring them to a center in the autonomous community, as long as it confirms that it has places.
"It cannot be that the State leaves us the children with a delivery note," summarized the Minister of Social Welfare, Candelaria Delgado (CC), responsible for Minors, on September 3, the day after President Clavijo announced that he would consider that the children who have just arrived by boat are the responsibility of the State, not of the autonomous community, given that they do not give him an answer to the saturation that the centers on the islands are experiencing.
According to this circular from the Prosecutor's Office, the Public Ministry understands that the frame of reference for determining whether the minor has been correctly handed over to the authority responsible for their guardianship is the protocol approved in 2014, during the Government of Mariano Rajoy, by the Ministries of Justice, Interior, Social Services and Foreign Affairs, as well as by the State Attorney General's Office itself.
If the duty prosecutor on each island receives a notice from the Police that a center of the Canary Islands Government does not accept a minor who has arrived on the coast without the company of any family member, they will issue an official letter to the General Directorate of Child Protection to "request that the necessary measures be adopted" so that they are taken in "immediately" in the protection center that they consider.
In parallel, they will instruct the Police to provide them with food and accommodation "until they are picked up by the General Directorate, or the center where they should be admitted is indicated, or, in accordance with the protocol published today, they are handed over to the Canary Islands Autonomous Police, in which case the length of stay of said minor in said police facilities must be controlled".
The senior prosecutor of the Canary Islands also orders that the Police be asked for a detailed report on the personal circumstances of that minor, on their state of health and on what happened on their journey to the islands, with details on how many days they were at sea or whether any of their companions died.
In addition, the duty prosecutor "will identify in detail the people from the General Directorate of Child Protection who either do not answer the calls, or tell them that they do not have the capacity to take in said minors, or that they are not going to take care of them based on 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 later the prosecutors specialized in Immigration or Trafficking in Human Beings "must initiate the corresponding pre-trial investigation proceedings in the event of the possible commission of a crime of child abandonment without prejudice to any other crime that may appear in the course of the investigation".
