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France & UK speed up movement of children from Calais camp

CCTV.com

10-18-2016 05:53 BJT

Officials in France are trying to identify unaccompanied minors in the refugee camp known as the Jungle. The controversial site is set to be demolished. But it's a process that's fraught with difficulty.

The registration process is chaotic. The French and British government are speeding up the process of unaccompanied migrant children out of the Jungle and everyone here wants to get their case heard.

On Monday, 14 children arrived in London to be reunited with relatives already living in Britain. More are expected to follow in the coming weeks, but campaigners say not enough children are going to be resettled.

It's taken a hell of a long time for it to happen, it's taken a hell of a lot of pressure for it to happen. It's great that it is happening, but what we are hearing is that maximum it's going to be 300 children and we've got over 1,000 children here... and what about the rest?

The identification process is extremely complicated. Most of the minors are teenagers without passports or other forms of ID and proving their age - and their claim to be travelling alone - is difficult.

Soon the Jungle camp will be demolished and the thousands of people who call it home will be forcibly evicted.

Youth support groups say when part of the camp was destroyed earlier this year, more than one hundred unaccompanied minors went missing. And there is concern that children who are not granted safe passage to the UK will try more dangerous ways of getting there.

"As we draw closer to an eviction the attempts of young people to get across to the UK and the risks that they'll take to do it increase and it becomes more and more desperate to get there because eventually this will go and their support structure will also go. The main illegal route now would be on a lorry, stowing away on a lorry and there are frequent attempts by children to get onto moving vehicles and children have died doing it," Jonathan Willis with Refugee Youth Service said.

The French government had planned to start dismantling this camp, this week. That's been delayed now, which does mean there is more time to process the resettlement of unaccompanied minors. But the fate of many young, vulnerable, people here in the Jungle remains far from clear.

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