France-Morocco Deal on Unaccompanied Minors Raises Concerns Over Deportation Measures

France and Morocco had signed this agreement on December 7. The text has not been disclosed so far, but the Gisti, an association providing legal aid to exiles, claims to have obtained, on Tuesday, January 12, a document entitled "Procedure scheme for the care of unaccompanied Moroccan minors", drawn up in October 2019 and which seems to set the legal framework for the collaboration between the two countries, reports InfoMigrants.

This document is "extremely worrying in many respects," the association stresses, explaining that it provides for the return of minors to Morocco without their consent or a request from the family, with the possible use of force. "This recourse will have to be limited to the most serious situations and when there is no prospect of convincing the minor [to return to Morocco], nor any possibility for the service to which the child is entrusted to proceed otherwise," it is written.

"A minor should never be forcibly removed," firmly states Jean-François Martini, a lawyer at Gisti. "Under the guise of ’educational assistance’ cooperation, we are in the process of secretly inventing a special removal measure for foreign minors. If it only targets Moroccans for the moment, we can fear that it will then be extended to other countries," he continues, denouncing an "authoritarian measure of removal".

The Ministry of Justice defends itself: it is a "cross-border placement of a minor". According to its explanations, this Franco-Moroccan procedure scheme is part of the framework of the Convention of October 19, 1996 on the protection of children, which itself explicitly refers to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. "All of this is done with the law as it stands, we are not inventing anything," the chancellery assures.

According to the leaked document, "the idea of this procedure scheme is simply to define the practical arrangements for the children’s judge to prepare his decision, make it and ensure its implementation. It is therefore, if the best interests of the child so require, to organize the care of the child within a child protection institution in his country of origin or with his family."