By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, Mar 29 2007 (IPS)

Minors landing on Italian coasts will be taught their rights under a new law.

About 160,000 children unaccompanied by adults arrived in Italy last year, half of tem from either Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa, severe conflict zones.

They arrive as potential asylum seekers, but are often completely unaware of their rights. Now a new law that came into force earlier this month guarantees them the right to know their rights.

“Maritime border and land police must provide unaccompanied minors – accordingly to their age and assisted by intercultural mediators or interpreters – with all the information they can on seeking asylum,” says the new law. A provision for this had been strongly lobbied by human rights groups.

The number of minors coming from Afghanistan is progressively increasing, Centro Astalli of the Jesuit Refugee Service told IPS. About half of the 525 minors the service has assisted this year came from Afghanistan, after a journey that for some took years.

“If on his arrival the minor expresses the intention to ask for asylum, he must be immediately handed over to a specialised centre for protection of asylum seekers and refugees (Sistema di protezione per richiedenti asilo e rifugiati, SPRAR), which has the competence to assist the minor through the hard process of integration in a foreign cultural environment, “Marcella Lucidi, undersecretary to the interior minister told IPS.

This assistance must be offered “from both a human and legal point of view,” she said.

Now ‘integration’ is a new word in Italian rules on migration flows. The change has been brought by the year-old centre-left government led by Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who had pledged to support immigrant rights through his election campaign last year.

The former right-wing government had maintained a hard stance on immigrants. Under an immigration law passed in 2002, the government introduced a tough policy that allowed only foreign workers with job contracts to obtain a residence permit.

The law imposed an annual quota on the number of foreign workers, and provided for expulsion of undocumented people.

The practise so far has been to transfer illegal immigrants, asylum seeking minors too, to controversial detention centres. These centres are not open to independent visitors, and are notorious for difficult living conditions and for disregarding the human rights of detainees.

Under reforms brought in by the new government these detention centres will be closed down, starting with those at Ragusa and Crotone in Sicily.

That itself will bring relief also to children detained at these centres.

“The period that minors spend in those centres, waiting to be entrusted to the social workers, is the most risky,” Lucidi said. “It could last months, enough for the child to escape and disappear. We should not forget that unaccompanied minor migrants are particularly vulnerable, because they’re young, strangers, and alone.”

The new directive, she said, will ensure that a minor is not left alone after his arrival. Processing of an asylum request from a minor would be speeded up to see that the child does not escape “and that the minor is not trapped in any kind of trafficking or illegal activity.”

Assisting minors through the process of seeking asylum should bring down the high number of requests that are rejected only because of an incorrect application.

Save the Children Italy, the local affiliate of the international organisation supporting children’s rights, says the directive represents a new awareness.

“It is a real opportunity for unaccompanied minors to access the asylum procedure, and a way towards full refugee status,” says Carlotta Sami, project director of Save the Children.

Legal and cultural support from specialised advisors would now be needed, Sami said. “Only with specific training and support can security forces and institutions put this law into practice, so that it can become an effective instrument to protect minors’ rights.”

Amnesty International Italy assisted 1,335 minors of a total of 22,016 migrants who landed on the Italian coast in 2006. The highest number of unaccompanied children and young girls came from Egypt.

Amnesty says many of them later left Sicily for northern cities in Italy or other European countries in search of jobs, before they could be identified.

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