The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners have a long history of dedicated work to meet the needs of refugee children and of continuing to build on the experience and create ever improved approaches to meeting those needs. From the outset, the best interests principle has been fundamental to UNHCR’s work with unaccompanied and separated refugee children. This has involved the recognition that, in the absence of a parent or customary caregiver, each child requires individual assessment and planning, and that child’s wishes should be considered in all decisions regarding their immediate and long-term protection and care.
In May 2006 UNHCR provisionally released Guidelines on the Formal Determination of the Best Interests of the Child. These provide specific guidance to UNHCR and partner staff around the procedural safeguards and documentation needed when making any decision that has a fundamental impact on the life of an unaccompanied or separated child (e.g., making complex protection decisions, providing a durable solution, removing a child from parents). The Guidelines state these “higher procedural safeguards are necessary” to ensure the best interests of the child are upheld in these high impact decisions. The ability of UNHCR field offices to effectively implement these Guidelines, therefore, will depend in part on the extent to which current systems and resources already address child protection and best interests considerations and that field offices are able to identify when formal best interests determination procedures are required.
LIRS identified a number of “preconditions” that should be in place in order to implement the Guidelines as currently written:
- the actual identification of unaccompanied and separated children (UASC),
- documentation on UASC case history,
- tracing of family members,
- the appointment of guardians and
- the monitoring and review of care arrangements.
To assist UNHCR in establishing the extent to which these preconditions for conducting formal Best
Interests Determinations are in place LIRS:
- developed a tool for mapping UASC practice in UNHCR field operations;
- used this tool to map policies, procedures and practice in two UNHCR field operations; and
- consulted with key experts on unaccompanied and separated children to confirm, clarify and expand upon the information obtained from the two mappings.
This report lays out six main findings that emerged from the mappings and expert interviews, and discusses their potential implications for the implementation of the Guidelines:
- there is a piecemeal approach to UASC programming,
- there is great value in interagency collaboration with child-focused agencies,
- there are identification and documentation bottlenecks,
- informal approaches to care arrangements and family tracing lead to inconsistent results,
- BIDs are used too narrowly, usually only in the context of resettlement, and
- there is a need for consistent and increased child welfare expertise.
Throughout the study we observed a high degree of concern for the needs of unaccompanied and separated children and many efforts to juggle these with competing demands for time and resources. While many of the BID preconditions do exist and country operations continue to make improvements despite budget and staffing limitations, a number of systemic problems and common gaps in programming for unaccompanied and separated children were identified in the mappings and confirmed in the expert interviews. In particular, many country operations will more than likely need to strengthen child welfare efforts on the front-end of the displacement cycle if they are to meaningfully “operationalize” the Guidelines.
This report concludes with some suggestions aimed at strengthening unaccompanied and separated child systems, ensuring BID preconditions are in place and supporting implementation of the Guidelines. These include actions to: establish comprehensive strategies, ensure identification and documentation groundwork, recognize the need for targeted individualized casework and family tracing, change the current BID mindset, prioritize child welfare capacity, strengthen strategic partnerships with child-focused agencies, and develop practical case-based training materials.