Spain violated the rights of a migrant minor after she was forced to undress and undergo medical tests to determine her age, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) says. The committee cited a report released last Thursday (February 25) by the Fundación Raíces, a Spanish NGO that followed the youth from Cameroon.
A state attorney ordered the young migrant to undergo medical examinations, including the examination of her genitals. She was deprived of the protection given to minors because she was declared an adult following the procedure.
Arcange – which is not her real name, to protect her identity – landed at Madrid’s airport in 2017, the Fundación Raíces said. She fled Cameroon after being repeatedly raped. Police registered her as a minor and “potential asylum seeker.”
She was transferred to a hosting center for minors, where the age she had declared, 16, was considered plausible by those taking care of her.
Examine Breasts and Genitals
Procedures subsequently ordered by a state attorney, including making the girl undress to “examine her breasts and genitals,” raised doubt about her statement that she was a minor.
The prosecutor, therefore, declared her of age and deprived her of the protection reserved for minors under 18. Two years after her arrival, according to the Fundación Raíces, the UN asked for Arcange to be placed once again under the care of a hosting center for minors.
At the end of 2019, Spain recognized her status as a refugee.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said Spain violated the youth’s rights, particularly since the procedure to determine her age constituted an “illegal interference into her private life as a victim of sexual violence.”
Moreover, it accused Spain of refusing Arcange’s documents indicating her real age as valid proof.
‘I can now live and feel like myself.’
“I am very happy to know that finally it is recognized and accepted that I was 16 and not 18 when I arrived in Spain,” Arcange said.
The UN committee asked Spain to pay the refugee compensation for moral damage, offering her adequate psychological support and rectifying her documents’ age.
Moreover, it asked Spain to ban the practice of forcing underage migrants to go through invasive medical procedures to determine their age.
“I can now live feeling like myself, with my true age. I was someone they had made up before,” Arcange said. Lourdes Reyzábal, the Fundación Raíces, denounced that this type of examination to determine someone’s age is common practice.
“We have already had hundreds of cases of this kind,” Reyzábal told the Spanish newspaper El País.
Migrant Crisis
The arrival of more than 16,000 migrants in the Canary Islands this year, and the fact that half of these arrivals took place over the last year, has pushed the Spanish government to deal with a growing humanitarian and political crisis.
Local and regional leaders have repeatedly complained about a lack of support from the central government, and in some coastal towns under migratory pressure, residents have been staging public protests for months.