A 15-year-old Syrian girl cannot go back to her mother who is stranded in Greece due to the halt of the Balkan route along which refugees were travelling through Europe. With the halt of the route, there are also interruptions with the children when they need to reunite with their parents, Telegraf.mk informed.
Moving along the refugee route, the girl reached Macedonia, and the mother was stranded in Greece. The girl has been here for over a month, and is currently staying in a safe house in Skopje, while the Greek Red Cross is making efforts to bring her back to her parent in Greece.
Another child, also from Syria, is waiting to reunite with his brother, who has already reached one of the European countries. The brothers are in contact, the procedure in progress. This is the only case where a refugee who has reached EU has requested a family reunion with a member stranded in Macedonia.
These cases are becoming more dramatic due to the halt, as well as the suspense among the refugees in Vinojug and Tabanovce transit centers. Following the EU-Turkey agreement, over 1,000 people have been stranded in Macedonia for weeks now, and they refuse to go back, and there is no information whether they will be let to go to EU.
For the remaining 25 children, who according to the data of UNHCR are now in Tabanovce, and have been registered as unaccompanied by a parent or close relative, there has been no request for reunion. Those children are between the ages of 14-17.
"In many cases, when one family member is in Macedonia and another is in Europe, the procedure for reunion is long and not at all easy, due to the legal conditions for asylum in the European countries," the humanitarian said.
One of the reasons there are so little requests to reunite with the unaccompanied children in our transit centers is because most often their parents are still in Afghanistan. They do not look for their children because according to the rules, they would have to take them back to war-torn counties.
Since the beginning of the refugee crisis, Macedonian Red Cross has successfully mediated 2 cases of family reunion. The first is with a child of Afghanistan, meeting his mother who had already reached Macedonia with her four other children, and they have later been sent to their father in Finland. The second case is with two brothers, one 11 years old, the other 13 months old, and they have been taken to their parents who had arrived in Germany.
According to the rules, the child goes in the country where the parent is. The procedure cannot begin until the parents receive a status of asylum seekers.