French Senator Proposes Reforms to Address Unaccompanied Minor Delinquency

Senator Henri Leroy and the three other senators (Hussein Bourgi, PS, Laurent Burgoa, LR and Xavier Iacovelli, LREM) appointed by the Senate presented their parliamentary information report on Unaccompanied Minors (UAMs) last Wednesday. On this occasion, the Committee on Social Affairs and the Committee on Laws adopted this report. In it, Henri Leroy regrets "the inadequacy of the responses to a massive and lasting phenomenon" with a number of UAMs entering the child welfare system that has more than tripled between 2014 and 2017, going from 5,033 to 17,022 according to figures from the Ministry of Justice, reports CNEWS.

These UAMs are taken care of by child welfare (ASE). "These care have an extremely expensive cost for local authorities: 23,461 unaccompanied minors were thus taken care of by the departmental councils as of December 31, 2020 for an estimated annual cost of 1.1 billion euros," specifies the elected official, noting that these UAMs are subject to a specific procedure upstream of their care. Noting a "lack of leadership and coordination", Henri Leroy proposes to reform the governance of this policy by involving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this sense, he calls for the transfer to the State of the evaluation and sheltering of people presenting themselves as UAMs and for the payment of an "exceptional" contribution from the State to support the departments.

To put an end to "the violence and delinquency generated by these UAMs", the elected official calls for the deployment of strong measures such as the implementation of sanctions against "militant acts of support for the circulation of persons illegally present on the territory, when they are not humanitarian acts, the establishment of a national register of delinquent unaccompanied minors or the conclusion of consular agreements with the countries of departure and transit, similar to the cooperation mechanism recently put in place with Morocco".