As countries are starting to roll out their COVID-19 vaccination strategies, PICUM has been monitoring some European national policies concerning undocumented migrants. Based on media reports, official sources and information we received from our members and social media followers, we have started to compile a map displaying the countries that explicitly include undocumented people in their Covid-19 vaccination strategy and those who explicitly exclude them.

Undocumented migrants are explicitly mentioned as a target group for vaccination in the Dutch and Spanish vaccination strategies. The UK government has published guidance according to which no fees and no immigration checks would apply to people accessing the COVID-19 vaccines. In France, a December decree made the vaccines available for free for every person living in the country, without need of presenting a health insurance card.

Follow us on Twitter @PICUM_post to know more as we keep updating the map and sharing more information about the national contexts.

The UN Human Rights Committee has found that Italy failed to save 200 migrants, including 60 children, who drowned after their boat sank in the Mediterranean in 2013. In response to a joint complaint launched by a group of survivors, the Committee stated that Italy failed to respond to several distress calls and to explain why they did not dispatch their coast guard boats or navy ships. The Committee urged Italy to proceed with an independent and timely investigation and to prosecute those responsible, and to provide effective remedy to those who lost their families in the accident.

The Court of Rome has found that the Italian practice of pushing migrants, including asylum seekers, from the Italian border to Slovenia, where they would be subject to pushbacks to Bosnia, is in violation of the Italian constitution, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and international law. These pushbacks have been justified by the Italian government as the application of a bilateral agreement between Italy and Slovenia.

The EU's border agency, Frontex, is suspending its operations in Hungary, following the country’s continued pushbacks of migrants into neighbouring Serbia, which had been declared illegal by the EU Court of Justice in December. The stop to the operations comes after calls from Hungarian civil society, which had warned that by operating in the country, Frontex would risk being complicit in illegal activities. In January 2021, the European Parliament set up a scrutiny group to examine Frontex’s fundamental rights compliance, the agency's internal management, and its transparency and accountability towards the European Parliament. The Agency is also under investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office, which is looking into allegations of harassment, misconduct and migrant pushbacks.

A group of public health experts has published an article in the American Journal of Public Health arguing that “safely releasing detainees from immigration detention centres into their communities is the most effective way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in these settings. Failure to do so will result in infection and death from a novel communicable disease and deepen inequities for a population group that already experiences many structural and systemic threats to health and well-being.”

In early December, the Court of the Hague annulled an earlier decision from the Netherland’s State Secretary for Justice and Security to deport an Iranian national with severe heart problems, on the grounds that the State Secretary had failed to take into account Iran’s COVID-19 situation. According to the Court, the man could have lacked access to necessary healthcare services in Iran given the pressure that the pandemic has placed on the country’s healthcare infrastructure. The court requested the State Secretary to conduct further research into the individual’s access to necessary medical treatment in Iran, and to make a new decision within ten weeks.

US-based media outlet BuzzFeed News has obtained “thousands of pages of documents from internal investigations of deaths of immigrants held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.” It reported that 21 immigrants “died in ICE custody from October 2019 to October 2020, the highest number of such deaths under the agency’s watch in 15 years. BuzzFeed determined that “in multiple instances, guards who were supposed to observe detainees placed in solitary confinement for extra monitoring falsified records to hide apparent dereliction of duty.”

The European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that “The right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right that should be enshrined in national and European law” and that “decent housing includes access to clean and high-quality drinking water, adequate sanitation and hygiene facilities, as well as connection to sewage and water networks.” The text includes references to migrants among the groups disproportionately represented among those living in homelessness or informal accommodation.

In a recent finding, the Committee on the Rights of the Child concluded that Switzerland violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for failing to take due diligence in assessing a child’s best interests in a case involving the removal of their family from Azerbaijan. The ruling comes as Swiss authorities are facing increasing legal challenges regarding its detention decisions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the case TQ v Staatssecretaris van Justitie en Veiligheid, which concerned an unaccompanied child who was to be returned to Guinea on his 18th birthday, the EU Court of Justice stated (i) that EU member states have an obligation to take into account the best interests of the child at all stages of the return procedure; that (ii) a child cannot be returned when reception facilities are absent, and (iii) the Return Directive does not allow for Member States to issue return decisions that cannot directly be enforced - Member States must refrain from keeping children in limbo until their 18th birthday, and then forcibly return them, because that is at odds with the child’s best interests.

This February, the first emergency shelter for homeless unaccompanied children opened in Paris. The shelter is specifically meant for unaccompanied children who are appealing the result of their age assessment. The shelter opened after years of advocacy to create care facilities for this vulnerable group of children, who are currently left to fend for themselves.

Data obtained by the UK Child’s Commissioner has shown that between April and September 2020, 80 unaccompanied children were detained after crossing the Channel to the UK. One of the children had been detained for 65 hours, with no proper place to sleep or access to fresh air. The detention of unaccompanied children upon arrival is arguably due to failing of the national relocation scheme. The UK government has acknowledged that the scheme is in need of reform but no changes have been implemented yet.

Various sources have confirmed the inhumane circumstances in which migrant children and families are currently trying to survive in Bosnia and Herzegovina, often residing close to the Croatian border. Save the Children reported that around 50 unaccompanied children had been found sleeping rough, with no access to schooling, healthcare and proper housing. Media coverage confirms the use of violent push-backs by Croatian border guards to whomever tries to cross the border.

The Spanish government has refused to follow the recommendations by the Spanish Ombudsman to protect undocumented victims of crimes from being issued a deportation order when they report a crime to the police. The recommendation followed the case of an undocumented woman in Valencia who approached the police to report mistreatment from her landlord, and ended up with a deportation order instead. The Ombudsman will consider covering the legal vulnerability of undocumented people in his annual report.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has released the Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2020, which stresses the vulnerability to human trafficking of undocumented migrants and people who are in desperate need of employment, pointing to the fear of being deported as one of the reasons. On trafficking for forced labour, the report states that, generally, this is the result of a deterioration of labour rights (lower salaries, longer working hours, reduced protections and informal employment) across a range of economic sectors (agriculture, construction, fishing industry, mining, street trading and domestic servitude).

The European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) in December and on the European Social Fund (ESF+) in January. While AMIF is meant to fund mainly integration of regular migrants, ESF+ does not have this limitation, which implies that also undocumented migrants can be beneficiaries of funded activities not linked with employability. For the first time, the ESF+ will require those member states where the number of children at risk of poverty is above the EU average to dedicate at least 5% of their envelope to this group.

In December 2020, the Swiss Federal Council adopted a report on undocumented migrants in Switzerland, where it rejects collective regularisations in the country but at the same time leaves the door open for some level of access to public services. The report comes to the conclusion that a general exclusion of undocumented migrants from all social security schemes would seriously infringe Switzerland's obligations under international law.

On his first day in office, US President Joe Biden pledged to create an eight-year path to citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants living in the country. The plan proposes to grant temporary legal status for five years to undocumented immigrants already living in the US, who would then be eligible for a green card after paying taxes. In addition, an estimated 2 million of the current recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“Dreamers”) would be allowed to immediately apply for permanent legal residency.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution on the EU Gender Equality Strategy (2020-2025) which calls EU institutions and Member States to address all forms of discrimination that hinder gender equality for all women regardless of their migration status. In particular, the resolution calls for access to justice for all victims, access to complaint mechanisms for all workers and access to healthcare and early childhood education, as well as protection from gender-based violence, for all women and girls. In addition, while some language in the resolution conflates trafficking for sexual exploitation and sex work, the resolution calls for rights and protection of sex workers.