Barns egna asylskäl: Om rätten att bli sedd som individ

Children have rights, the same as adults, yet they also have particular rights as children. This also applies to asylum-seeking children. These children can have the same reasons for seeking asylum as an adult, but also for reasons relevant to being a child – for example the risk of being forcibly recruited into the military or forced to undergo female genital mutilation.

For the fourth time, Save the Children Sweden maps children’s reasons for seeking asylum. Approximately 50 family cases from the Swedish Migration Agency and 30 settlements from the Migration Courts were examined. The mapping examined whether or not children have spoken out during the asylum seeking process, how children’s own reasons for seeking asylum have been judged, and to what degree the child’s reason for seeking asylum affects the decision on residency.

The mapping shows that children are given too little opportunity to speak out, especially when it came to the length and type of questions asked in the interview process. There was also found to be a lack of access to and use of information on the situation of children in the homeland of the child in question. The most distressing finding was that children were not treated or seen as individuals and the subsequent lack of their reasons for seeking asylum to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Of the examined cases, not a single child was granted residency based on the reasons the child gave for seeking asylum.