CYIL vol. 13 (2022)

CYIL 13 ȍ2022Ȏ IRO: UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN AND THEIR INTERESTS and social integration into the new environment. The assurance was based on the value of equal educational opportunity supported by many national immigration schemes. The last assurance required the prospective guardian, in the role of a resettled child’s sponsor, to demonstrate their sound financial position. Meaning that the administrative authorities of the present place of residence and of the receiving state both required assurances that the resettled children would be sufficiently provided for in terms of living expenses, education, and health care until having attained the age of majority. 67 The IRO staff neither prepared the plans for unaccompanied children in loco parentis nor performed the task of their institutional guardian. A notable point of concern in this regard was the involvement of the children themselves, particularly the older ones, in the planning of their future. The relevant UN documents failed to yield any adequate records about the inclusion of the children’s interests and preferences. The imperative of participation would have demanded that the formulation of projects pivotal to one’s future not be solely based on authoritative discretion and without any significant input of the main protagonists: the unaccompanied children. 4.3 Principle of best interests of the (unaccompanied) child Not all unaccompanied children were situated in the children’s centers established across the occupation zones, where they could have stayed until reunification with their proper families, individual repatriation, or resettlement in a new country with a designated guardian. Some children sojourned in camps for adult refugees and displaced persons. There, the children were sometimes cared for by an adult cohabitant to whom they were not related. Other children were also taken in by married couples or families, but without the caregivers having been recognized as fostering or adoptive parents in an official capacity. Often tasked with the transfer of unaccompanied children into this sort of informal alternative care were the voluntary organizations. The IRO staff was given the responsibility to provide effective services to the occupation authorities: to establish the child’s identity, their status, the competence and ability of the caretaking adult, married couple, or family to provide the child with appropriate protection and care, etc. The IRO case workers were obliged to proceed with due diligence in order to obtain all the relevant facts and information about the child and their temporary caregivers. For success, each of those cases chiefly depended on the assigned case worker’s individual approach, thoroughness in data collection, and analysis, familiarity with personal circumstances of the involved persons and general awareness of the social facts. Facts and circumstances were both factors on the basis of which a permanent solution as to the unaccompanied children’s future was to be proposed to the competent occupation authorities (military commands or courts). Children could have, for example, remained with a German family, because they wished to live in the occupation zone, or be taken against their will and forcibly repatriated. The proposal of local settlement stood in direct contradiction to the usual return of unaccompanied children into the country of origin. It was imperative for the authorities involved to carefully consider the children’s well-being and the depth of their emotional attachment to the, present and prospective, caregivers. And that was certainly no easy task.

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67 Ibid.