TIRANA, May 16 – The number of unaccompanied Albanian minors who sought asylum in EU member states hit a five-year low in 2017, but yet remained high even though Albanian authorities introduced legal action against parents abandoning their children in the Schengen Area.
Data published by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, shows some 530 asylum applicants considered to be unaccompanied minors sought international protection in 28 EU member states as well as four EFTA states.
The UK, a country where Albanians needs visas to enter, is the top destination for unaccompanied Albanian minors seeking protection, accounting for half of the total number of Albanian asylum applicants aged below 18 years old.
Most unaccompanied Albanian minors to the UK enter illegally and often claim they could be victims of blood feud killing in case they stay in Albania after they turn 16.
Some 250 Albanian minors sought protection in the UK in 2017, down from 405 in 2016 and a record high of 630 in 2014.
Albanians pay up to £10,000 to be smuggled to the UK, usually in the back of lorries or using fake IDs from EU member countries to seek a better life although often end up in the criminal underworld, British media report.
Minor asylum seekers in the UK are generally placed in foster care by the local council or semi-independent accommodation. British authorities say most children are not granted refugee status but instead are given the ‘Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children’ grants which is a temporary measure that protects minors until they are 17 and a-half and many find themselves facing removal from the UK once they turn 18.
A recent investigative article by British media shows the UK’s National Referral Mechanism, a system for identifying and protecting victims of trafficking, isn’t working for Albanian children.
In 2016, of 229 unaccompanied children from Albania who received an initial decision on their asylum claim, only two were granted refugee status, according to the Refugee Council report, Children in the Asylum System 2017. The year before the figure was one, says the OpenDemocracy portal.
The article says that there’s a common assumption that Albania is a safe country and that these children are economic migrants even among professionals whose job it is to protect vulnerable children — lawyers, teachers and social workers
“But this does not match the facts. Of the 3,805 potential victims of trafficking referrals to the National Referral Mechanism in 2016, 699, the largest number, came from Albania, according to the National Crime Agency,” says the article.
The total number of unaccompanied Albanian minors for 2017 is considerably lower compared to the peak 2015 level of 1,065 when unaccompanied minor asylum seekers to the UK accounted for half of the total.
In addition to the UK, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France are the top destinations for Albanian minor asylum seekers seeking to escape poverty in their home country, mainly northern and northeastern Albania.
Experts say such a large figure of youngsters leaving Albania could have major implications for the country’s demographics in the future. Often considered as one of the countries with the youngest population in Europe, Albania is slowly getting older. Alongside the mass exodus of the younger generation, lower birth rates and a longer life span are also contributing to an ageing population.
The rise in minor asylum seekers follows a general trend of Albanians seeking ungrounded asylum to rich EU member countries mainly Germany and France since 2013.
More than 146,000 Albanians, about 5 percent of the country’s resident population, have sought international protection in EU member countries in the past five years with their number peaking at 66,000 in 2015 and dropping to 22,000 in 2017.
However, only few thousands have been granted international protection and a considerable number have come back either voluntarily or after being deported.
