[ad_1]
LONDON, Jan. 24 (AP) Opposition parties and child advocates accused the British government on Tuesday of putting vulnerable young people at risk after authorities said dozens of children who arrived in Britain as asylum seekers had gone missing.
Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick told lawmakers that more than 200 children and teenagers under the age of 18 have gone missing from government-approved accommodation. He said most were teenage boys from Albania.
Read also | Seismic data hints that Earth’s inner core has “stopped spinning,” hotly debated.
Labor MP Peter Kyle said 76 children were missing from a hotel in the south coast seaside town of Brighton, one of several hotels across the country temporarily housing unaccompanied children.
Citing child protection sources and an unidentified whistleblower working for a government contractor, The Observer reported this week that dozens of teenagers had been kidnapped from the street outside a Brighton hotel and stuffed into cars .
“What disturbs us is the fact that if a child in this room who is related to one of us disappears, the world stops,” Kyle said in the Commons. “But in the community, I represent a child who disappears and then There were five missing, then a dozen missing, then 50 missing, 76 missing at the moment, but nothing happened.”
Labor’s immigration spokeswoman Yvette Cooper accused the government of “totally failing to put children at risk”.
Rachel de Souza, England’s children’s commissioner, said reports of children disappearing from hotels “underscore once again the vulnerability of these children, their state of uncertainty and a concerted group of people determined to exploit them” .
“I fear for the safety of this group of children, who are made more vulnerable by not speaking English, many of whom have no support network and are unaware of their rights,” she said in a letter to the Home Office.
Security guards, nurses and social workers are all working at the hotel to keep the children safe, Jenrick said.
But he acknowledged that “we have no right to detain unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in these settings, and we know that some do go missing.”
“Many missing persons were subsequently tracked and located,” he said.
Jenrick said he had seen no evidence that children had been abducted on the street, but promised to investigate further.
“I’m not going to let it go,” he said.
While the UK receives fewer asylum seekers than European countries such as Italy, Germany and France, there has been a huge increase in the number of people trying to cross the English Channel in small boats. In 2022, more than 45,000 people will cross the English Channel to reach the UK, with several dying trying.
The government has pledged to stop the dangerous journey, but so far without success. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
[ad_2]
Source link