The war in Ukraine has disrupted the lives of thousands of school children. But a school in Rome has made a special effort to allow some to continue learning as they did before the conflict began.
Save the Children and a juvenile court in the Sicilian city of Catania have signed a protocol to improve the hosting system and the protection of foreign unaccompanied minors. Nearly a quarter of unaccompanied migrant children and teens present in Italy are hosted in the region of Sicily.
Among the Ukrainian refugees arriving in Belgium are 600 unaccompanied minors. In order to register them administratively they need to be assigned legal guardians, according to Belgian law. But the numbers of those qualified to do this are insufficient. Almost 900 unaccompanied minors are still waiting to be assigned a guardian in Belgium.
The UN children's agency reports that, after six weeks of war, almost three million children in Ukraine need humanitarian assistance. So far the UN has verified the deaths of 142 children in the conflict.
A Jesuit center for refugees in Italy has noted that 67,040 migrants arrived in Italy in 2021 by sea, almost twice as many as the year before. Among them were nearly 10,000 unaccompanied minors.
UNICEF reached 7,000 refugee and migrant children and teens in 2021 through its program in Italy, the organization said in an annual report released on Monday, April 11.
The Austrian government has released figures showing that nearly 4,500 unaccompanied children who applied for asylum in Austria last year have disappeared. There are fears that many are at risk from human traffickers.
European countries are working out how to provide education and integration opportunities to the more than four million people who have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February. Two million of them are children, according to UNESCO.
The centers for unaccompanied minors in the Canary Islands have reached saturation point. Regional officials say that without state aid, new arrivals will be forced to sleep on the streets.
A report presented by the Catholic charity Caritas and the Migrantes foundation on the Italian island of Sardinia has highlighted that over 51,000 foreigners live in the region. They include 5,500 who attend school out of a student population of 200,000 on the island.
For migrant children who arrive in France in the middle of their education, getting back to school can be a challenge. They might have gone through a traumatic voyage with their families, and many don't speak French. The UPE2A program assists children in the process. InfoMigrants visits a school in Trappes, a Parisian suburb.
Following the deaths of nine migrants headed towards the Canary Islands in March 2021, two people have each been sentenced to nine years in prison. Two young children were among those who died.