INTRODUCTION

Child migrants are not a phenomenon specific to the EU, nor is detention the only issue that unaccompanied children face. But in 2017, minors still accounted for a third of all asylum seekers in the EU; among them, almost 15 per cent were unaccompanied, for a total of more than 30,000 asylum applications from unaccompanied minors in the EU. This number has only just started to decrease, following the general trend of first-time asylum applications in the EU, but had been rising constantly ever since the 1990s. Unaccompanied children are becoming a population which therefore must be factored into the EU asylum system, and their vulnerability must be considered. Moreover, asylum laws and policies can no longer be considered purely from a national, domestic perspective, as these competences have started to be transferred by Member States to the EU ever since the Amsterdam Treaty and the communautarisation of the 1985 Schengen Agreements and their 1990 Implementing Convention. Regarding the focus on detention of this chapter, it appears to be one of the most pressing issues for unaccompanied minors seeking asylum: detention is a total deprivation of liberty, here inflicted on one of the most vulnerable parts of the population. It seems to have been normalised in the context of immigration laws and policies in the EU since the 1990s, but any authority which wishes to use this mechanism outside of a punitive context needs to tread very carefully, or risk violating the fundamental rights of a very vulnerable population.

In this chapter, it will be examined whether or not the EU does tread carefully when it comes to allowing or demanding the placement of unaccompanied minors in detention by national authorities. Does the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) properly uphold international human rights and children's rights standards in its detention system for unaccompanied minors?

To begin with, the CEAS is made up of multiple instruments, and most of them were recast in 2013.