The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has defended in an interview granted to OKDIARIO that unaccompanied foreign minors arriving in Ceuta should be returned to Morocco.
The leader of the PP commented that the Government should verify the age of those who have arrived and cited as an example previous transfers from the Canary Islands to the Balearic Islands and Madrid.
The distribution of minors strains the communities
The position expressed by Feijóo comes amid a full discussion about what to do with the minors who remain in Ceuta after the massive arrival of migrants. The Government is working on a mechanism to transfer some of them to other autonomous communities, while the situation of the reception centers in the city continues to be one of the main problems arising from the crisis.
According to information published in recent days, more than 1,300 minors have been registered in Ceuta after the massive arrival, and the city has had to expand the resources allocated for their care.
The Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, has raised the need to accelerate the response and has maintained contacts with the Ceuta president, Juan Vivas, while the Government prepares the meeting of the Sectoral Commission on Childhood and Adolescence on August 13, in which the transfer of minors to other communities is expected to be addressed.
The problem is that Extremadura, Aragón, and Castilla y León have announced that they will not attend that meeting. The three regional governments are conditioned by the position of Vox, whose vice presidents have communicated their rejection to participate in the distribution of minors from Ceuta.
The Prosecutor's Office sets criteria to ensure protection
The institutional conflict has also reached the Attorney General's Office. The Attorney General, Teresa Peramato, has issued a decree directed at prosecutors to establish action criteria aimed at ensuring the protection of unaccompanied foreign minors in a situation of extraordinary migratory contingency.
The Prosecutor's Office warns that it will act if an autonomous community refuses to assume the obligations that correspond to it regarding the protection of these minors. The measure adds a new legal dimension to the political confrontation surrounding the distribution.
The Government maintains that the response must coordinate the different administrations and that the care of minors cannot fall exclusively on Ceuta. The autonomous city has been demanding a more balanced distribution of the responsibility for hosting for years, and the current crisis has multiplied the pressure on its resources.
The debate is thus in several simultaneous fronts: which minors can be transferred, how their age is determined, which communities must host them, and what is the applicable procedure regarding those who may be returned to their country of origin.
The issue of returns defended by Feijóo also opens a different debate from the territorial distribution. While the leader of the PP demands that minors be returned to Morocco, the situation of each minor must be determined according to the applicable legal procedure and taking into account the specific protection guarantees for unaccompanied foreign minors.