Feature: Children isolated on front line of refugee crisis

The head of the Council of Europe (CoE), a pan-European human rights organization based in Strasbourg, has called for urgent and effective action to protect unaccompanied minors trapped on the front line of the refugee crisis.

It was to the chiefs of state of the 47 member states of the CoE that Thorbjorn Jagland, the organization's Secretary General, addressed himself in a non-ambiguous Wednesday letter.

"Providing international protection to children fleeing war, violence and persecution should now be a priority for all European governments," Jagland declared to European leaders mired in a migratory crisis that continues to deepen.

Though French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron met on Thursday in Amiens, northern France, where refugees have arrived in high numbers with the hope to reach Britain, the CoE clearly rang the alarm and urged European states to take measures without delay.

The dismantlement currently underway of the "Jungle" of Calais, northern France, where several thousand refugees have piled up, has created new threats for isolated minors who have become stuck in what is the biggest slum in France. The question of family reunification for those minors whose families have been installed on British soil has divided Paris and London, who have met with knives drawn over the financial responsibilities.

French child advocate, Genvieve Avenard, deputy of the French rights advocate and former minister Jacques Toubon, has come into her own and rang the warning bell over the plight of more than 400 isolated minors in the "Jungle" of Calais. "When we see children out in the mud and the cold, we cannot envisage the dismantlement of the Jungle as it has been by the State," she said.

"Their living conditions are neither dignified or decent," lamented the deputy rights advocate. "The care and the census of each child must be organized and the categories of the children must be determined," she added.

British film actor Jude Law and other British personalities recently visited the "Jungle" of Calais in order to alert British public opinion on the situation of isolated minors and to question David Cameron.

"The demolition of even one section of the Jungle refugee camp in Calais will destroy the residences of thousands of people, including many families and hundreds of unaccompanied minors who have already fled the war and persecution," Avenard said.

In mid-January of last year, some 300,000 children arrived in Europe, of which many were unaccompanied, noted the Council of Europe on Wednesday. Almost one third of refugees and asylum seekers who pass through Turkey to Greece are children. According to Europol, at least 10,000 children have disappeared since the beginning of the crisis.

"It is essential to put in place rapid procedures for appointing legal guardians for unaccompanied children; provide suitable and safe accommodation, in which children are placed under the supervision of adequately trained staff or foster parents," said the CoE Secretary General on Wednesday in his missive to European Union heads of state.

"The refugee crisis is a trafficker's paradise. Thousands of children are escaping war only to vanish into the underbelly of European societies. It is difficult to imagine a greater moral imperative than keeping these boys and girls safe," he insisted.

In Greece, where some 10,000 people are still stuck on the Macedonian frontier, the threat of a humanitarian crisis is being accentuated day-by-day, according to NGOs who are working on the ground. Even while Brussels proposed on Wednesday to set up humanitarian aid worth 700 million euros to assist EU member states on the front line of the refugee crisis, there are many who fear procrastination and inertia from governments.

European Council President Donald Tusk, for his part, traveled Thursday to Athens and Ankara in the final stages of a trip through the countries situated on the migrant routes to Northern Europe, ahead of the EU-Turkey summit on the refugee crisis scheduled for March 7. Enditem