The Social Services of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, through an agreement with the non-profit organization Rescue and Emergency Service in Lanzarote (Emerlan), has given temporary accommodation to the Colombian family that arrived in Lanzarote with their four minor children on the morning of last Wednesday and who spent a night at the César Manrique Airport due to lack of economic resources.
E.S. and O.S. and their four children between the ages of five and seventeen spent Wednesday night in a room for tourist bus drivers at the island's aerodrome after landing on a flight from Madrid that same morning. According to what they have stated during an interview with La Voz, the six had landed in the Spanish capital on February 13 and after sleeping several days at the Airport, a passerby would have paid for a flight on the 26th to Lanzarote, with the aim of obtaining an appointment more quickly to request political asylum. Until this Friday morning, they had not yet been able to make that request effective, as confirmed by the Delegation of the Government of Spain in the Canary Islands.
This family fled to Spain with the aim of preventing the non-state armed forces from recruiting two of their children. The two minors had to stop going to school because the guerrillas were chasing them from school on motorcycles with the aim of capturing them and integrating them into their ranks. Many other classmates did not manage to escape, according to the testimony of their parents.
The Councilor for Social Welfare of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Marci Acuña, explained to La Voz that the first island institution learned on the morning of this Thursday that this family slept at the Airport. From the Social Inclusion Service, a newly created island tool, two social workers went to the Airport to investigate the situation of this family. "In that investigation process they discovered that they were potential asylum seekers," Acuña indicated.
With the aim of finding a space to relocate these four minors and their parents, Social Welfare found that "all the centers" to welcome asylum seekers "are saturated throughout Spain, that there are no spaces to leave them and that in Gran Canaria there is a resource for this type of case but it is saturated".
Social Welfare managed to "put this family unit in a safe environment in a home through an agreement with Emerlan, a home in conditions". Finally, he has announced that the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) in Gran Canaria has offered to give accommodation to this family in a resource on the neighboring island, a support space for people who are in the process of applying for asylum.
In addition, Acuña has explained that they have managed to "advance the manifestation of will", a judicial procedure where asylum seekers make their intention to request political asylum known to the authority, while waiting to obtain an appointment. The Ombudsman has already insisted to the Government of Spain on the need to improve access to asylum applications to avoid the violation of the rights of applicants.
"The first thing we do is attend to the emergency and it means taking care of and putting vulnerable people under security. That is our priority and it is where we have concentrated our efforts," Acuña stated.
However, it remains in the air how this situation has been possible. "How is it possible, how has a family unit arrived at the Madrid Airport without solvency to be in the country, have stated that they want to exercise an asylum request that is under an international right and end up in Lanzarote because at that Airport they indicate that in Lanzarote it is easier to process that? Something was not done properly, that you come 1,500 kilometers from an airport where that entry procedure has to be done," he concluded. At the same time that it is questioned that a "path of continuous cases of asylum requests" can be opened.