"Foreword: the plight of the migrant child" [2018] ELECD 687; in Crock, Mary; Benson, B. Lenni (eds), "Protecting Migrant Children" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) xv

Book Title: Protecting Migrant Children

Editor(s): Crock, Mary; Benson, B. Lenni

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781786430250

Section Title: Foreword: the plight of the migrant child

Number of pages: 5

Extract:

Foreword: the plight of the migrant child The situation of children displaced by armed conflict and other disasters is rightly a matter of great concern to the international community. In July 2017, I reported on the situation in Myanmar following a 12-day visit as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in that country. In the five months following my visit, no less than 604,000 Rohingyas were forced to flee Myanmar into Bangladesh.1 More than half of these refugees were children who in no time were facing starvation and death from disease and injury in conditions that can only be described as appalling.2 As the contributors to this volume attest, the sheer number of children on the move, both alone and with family members, is without precedent. The tragedy unfolding in Bangladesh finds parallels in the outflow of refugees from Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan. Children continue to flee violence in unprecedented numbers from Central American states into the United States. The hardships children endure in displacement are all too predictable. Even where they seek safety in wealthy countries, however, escape from misery and even persecution cannot be assured. In even the most developed of the world's countries, migrant and refugee children remain in immigration detention; they are selected arbitrarily for transfer to other countries for `processing'; they are denied access to basic social supports and to the education that is so critical to their wellbeing and human development.
My report is available at www.ohchr.org/ ...