MinAs
Marie-Bénédicte Dembour directed the UK side of a project researching how unaccompanied minors are treated in Europe and, in particular, whether their best interests as children are respected. Parallel research in Slovenia, Austria and France was being conducted by our partners.
The full title of the project was “In whose best interests? Exploring unaccompanied minors’ rights through the lens of migration and asylum processes”. In short, we called the project MinAs.
Research Fellow Jo Wilding conducted the research regarding the situation in the UK. She explained what the project was about in this video. You can find the executive summary here and the full report here for the UK side of the research.
The Conversation picked up Jo’s revelation that asylum seeker children face a welfare lottery on arrival at the UK as their top story on 24 September 2015.
The MinAs project run from July 2014 to December 2015.
It continues to have an impact, with Jo having for example responded to the House of Lords’ call for evidence on unaccompanied minors in Europe. For further details, see here.