El Mundo: Ukrainian refugee children in Europe could be victims of mafia and human traffickers

MOSCOW, August 24 – RIA Novosti. Due to the inadequacy of the border control and registration system in EU countries, refugee children from Ukraine are at risk of becoming victims of human trafficking, author El Mundo newspaper.

The chaotic exit from Ukraine of 10 million refugees fleeing conflict in the past six months is a troubled river of human traffickers and sex exploitation mafia.

One of the reasons for this publication is the lack of effective border control in Europe and is called a registration or tracking system for various groups of refugees leaving Ukraine.

The newspaper states that it has requested information on measures taken to register vulnerable refugee groups in 12 European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom). However, only four of them (France, Italy, Belgium and the Czech Republic) keep records of the number of unaccompanied minors, including age and gender data. In addition, Croatia and the Netherlands count refugee children, but did not elaborate on the details. At the same time, in the first month of the conflict in Ukraine, at least 3,885 such children arrived in these six countries, of which almost three thousand were in Italy.

El Mundo added that Spain, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Slovakia and Poland do not register Ukrainian children or claim that this data is confidential. And only five countries (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands and Croatia) were able to respond to the publication’s request for information on potential victims among refugee children.