Introduction 72 hours.1 Figure 2 illustrates the situations in which children are detained for immigration-related purposes. EU law- and human rights law-based legal safeguards to protect the right to liberty apply from the moment a person is physically held by the authorities and not from the time a detention order is issued or notified. In practice, the risk of unlawful or arbitrary detention is higher during the time period between the authorities stopping a person and the point they issue a detention order. Facilities used for temporary holding – such as police cells or holding rooms at border crossing points – may not be equipped to host vulnerable people, even for a short time period. Moreover, temporary facilities used for this purpose are not subject to the same level of scrutiny by independent actors as immigration detention facilities or prisons. As a result, children deprived of liberty in these situations often remain off the radar. Data about children in immigration detention There are no comparable and reliable data on how many children are detained for immigration-related purposes in the EU. The UN General Assembly recognised the need for better data on children and commissioned a Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, which could also offer an opportunity to provide better data on children in detention.2 For this report, FRA collected figures from EU Member States on the number of children detained on 31 December 2015, 31 March 2016 and 1 September 2016. These figures were subsequently compared with those received through an ad hoc query by the EMN, launched by the European Commission at FRA’s request in autumn 2016, through which the number of children in detention on two specific dates, namely 15 November 2016 and 1 December 2016, were collected. Table 1 provides an overview of the figures gathered. These figures exclude children temporarily confined to facilities other than formal detention centres, such as cells in police stations, border crossing points or airports. The numbers collected are a rough indication 1 2 of the scope of child detention in EU Member States. They are not comprehensive or directly comparable. They reflect only the number of children in detention at a specific point in time and not the number of children detained over the course of a certain period. Children detained with their parents may not always have been subject of a detention order but deprived of liberty to keep them together with their parents. According to the data provided by Member States for the different time points, the largest number of children in detention was found in Bulgaria on 1 September 2016 and high numbers of children were also detained in Greece, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Among the 180 children reported to be detained on 15 November 2016, 103 were boys and 77 were girls; among the 160 children held on 1 December 2016, 86 were boys and 74 were girls. Almost all unaccompanied children reported to be in detention on those two dates were boys. No children were detained on the days examined in Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Spain or the United Kingdom. FRA also sought information on the children who had spent the most time in immigration detention on each of those dates. Table 2 outlines the results. In 18 EU Member States the authorities reported that a child was detained on one of the specific dates, and 14 of them provided some data about the children who had spent the most time in detention on those dates. The number of detention days varied across Member States, from a few hours to several months. Only four EU Member States (Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Sweden) had held those children for 15 days or less. The reasons for the prolonged detention included doubts about the age of the child (Belgium), irregular border crossing (Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia and Poland), detention pending removal (Hungary) or waiting for appointment of guardian (Slovenia). Mainly boys were detained and in three cases authorities detained infants less than two years old together with their families (Luxembourg, Poland and Slovakia). The unaccompanied children detained longest were a 15-years old boy in Latvia (195 days, nationality not reported) and a 16-year old Syrian boy in Poland (151 days). See FRA (2010), Detention of third-country nationals in return procedures, Luxembourg, Publications Office of the European Union (Publications Office), Section 4.2. United Nations (UN), General Assembly, Resolution 69/157, Rights of the child, 18 December 2014, A/RES/69/157, paras. 48 (f) and 52 (d). 13