On 18 November 2014, the Austrian EMN National Contact Point (NCP) held a conference entitled Young Refugees in Austria and EU – Circumstances, Policies and Perspectives. The conference was attended by a representative of the EMN NCP for the Slovak Republic.
Machi Lazaridis from the IOM Office in Greece gave speech on international and regional legal instruments related to young refugees including UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, selected EU directives and the EU’s Dublin Regulation. At the same time she presented some IOM projects focused on this group of refugees. Birgit Einzenberger from the UNHCR Office in Austria spoke about the main countries of origin and reasons for fleeing. She emphasized that these reasons might be of a political, religious or ethnical nature, can be related to the belonging to certain social groups or nationality which is persecuted or among the reasons might also be child labour, sexual exploitation, or recruitment by terrorist organizations.
Adriano Silvestri from EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) pointed out the three main issues discussed during FRA conference held in Rome in 2013: insufficient protection of children at borders, the lack of mechanisms for protection and care for migrant minors and high number of unaccompanied minors who disappear. Hanne Beirens from ICF International (EMN service provider) gave an overview including the last statistics on unaccompanied minors in the EU Member States and Norway through the main findings of the EMN synthesis report Policies, Practices and Statistics on Unaccompanied Minors in 2014. According to the report, the lowest numbers of unaccompanied minors were recorded in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Slovak Republic while the highest numbers were recorded in Sweden, Germany, United Kingdom and Norway. In the last presentation of the panel, Saskia Koppenberg from IOM Office in Austria focused on the situation of young refugees in Austria who mostly come from Afghanistan, Algeria and Somalia and are usually aged 14 to 17 years.
Apart from being attended by experts from national, international and regional organisations, the following panel discussion also hosted a young migrant from Somalia who came to Austria as an unaccompanied minor and became a member of the youth organisation SO-MAL 21 bringing together Somali migrants in Vienna. At the end of the conference, a market place of various organisations supporting unaccompanied minors in Austria took place. A part of the conference was also a photo exhibition within the project Bodenlos on young refugees in Austria.
More information about the conference including programme and presentations is available on Austrian EMN NCP website.