The method is the same, repeated over and over: a Vietnamese child arrives at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport just north of Paris accompanied by an adult who claims to be one of his or her parents. Then, once the past the passport control posts, the adult takes the child’s identity papers and abandons them within the terminals of the second busiest airport in Europe.
The child, who usually does not speak French, might spend days in the building, with no-one taking particular notice of their presence, when in some cases they have eventually passed out for lack of food. When, finally, the minor is noticed and taken to the offices of the French border police, the PAF, the youngster will ask for political asylum – apparently the only, and well-rehearsed, words they are able to pronounce in French.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Under the standard procedure, when any non-EU national of any age arrives in a French airport, sea port or international rail station without the necessary documents for stay or residency, they are placed in what are called “waiting zones”. If, in the case of a minor, a magistrate, with the title of judge, decides to allow them to officially enter the country, they are theoretically then taken charge of by a member of the Social Aide for Children agency, the ASE, part of the public social services administration, whose task is to protect children who are in a potentially dangerous situation.
From there, the child will be placed in a hostel, or with a temporary foster family, or assigned to a hotel.
But, as revealed here by the European journalistic collective Investigate Europe (see the Boîte Noire section at bottom of page), Vietnamese minors released for entry into France at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport escape the system, to the benefit of human traffickers to whom they are bound as future and potentially lifelong hostages.
“Effectively, it is for us to fetch them at Roissy, but we don’t go there,” said Dominique (not his real name, which is withheld on his request), a member of staff with the local ASE services in the Seine-Saint-Denis département (county) close to the airport. “We are given charge of them by a judge by email, and-or called by the PAF, but because we no longer have a switchboard operator there’s no-one to pick up the phone.”
Investigate Europe can confirm that is indeed the case, after attempting to no avail over several days to get through to the agency’s general number.
“Each of us have between 100 and 150 cases of unaccompanied foreign minors,” said Dominique’s colleague Sophie (who also asked for her real name to be withheld). “There are only ten social workers out of 20 available posts. The situation is so critical that we’ve gone on strike twice this year. We don’t have the time to get out to take the youngsters to their appointments at the prefecture [local government administration office], so as for going to Roissy, impossible.”
Instead, Dominique and Sophie explained, many of the around 150 unaccompanied Vietnamese children released by the authorities from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle for entry into France in 2019 were taken by the PAF to a hotel, in which case the ASE is not necessarily notified, or brought directly to the ASE offices.
However, the PAF is not officially allowed to keep in their custody for more than an hour those children who have been released on a judge’s order. Furthermore, the officers are not supposed to transport children for reasons of insurance cover. A French association for the defence of the rights of foreign nationals detained at borders, the Anafé, described the practice as “arbitrary detention”, and underlined the problems that could arise if there was a road accident or other mishap involving an escorted minor.
But a far more sinister fate arises from the improvised initial release of the children on French soil. “Since at least two years, once installed in a hostel or hotel, Vietnamese minors arriving from the zone in Roissy disappear, all of them, without exception,” said Dominique. “We’ve given tens of reports of absconding to the central police station in [the nearby Paris suburb of] Bobigny. But that changes nothing, we’re given no means of protecting them. Each time it’s the same.”
“Several months ago, I myself took a 17-year-old girl to an emergency hostel to be sure that she did not disappear,” added Sophie. “But it happened, the next day she evaporated.”
Questioned, the local police prefecture, the administrative centre under which the Bobigny police station – or commissariat – is managed, said it was unaware of any “report regarding these events”.
But the problem is widely recognised, and not least by Europol, the European Union (EU) agency for law enforcement cooperation. In a report published in October 2018 entitled Criminal networks involved in the trafficking and exploitation of underage victims in the European Union, Europol noted that most of the cases it had been involved in concerning the trafficking of children from the Asian continent were those of “Vietnamese children exploited for labour purposes”.
“However, there were also investigations on domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, forced criminality and forced begging,” it continued. “The majority of victims were identified in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These countries are used by traffickers as both transit and destination countries for child victims […] Vietnamese trafficking networks are spread across continents in origin, transit and destination countries. They are divided into operative cells that handle victims one at a time. Such a geographical span blurs the criminal structure, can hinder law enforcement investigations, and limits the chances of distinguishing between core criminals and facilitators. Little is known about the profile of the criminal actors organising this trafficking, as once in Europe, when identified by police, minor victims are often unaccompanied.”
Europol also outlined how the Vietnamese minors, often bought or kidnapped in their home country, are briefed before their arrival in the EU on the procedures they must follow (such as how to demand asylum, their future contacts once inside the country, and rendezvous points after they abscond from care structures).
“Recruiters located in Vietnam target potential victims in the country,” noted the report. “They often look for orphans and minors suffering from economic or social distress or political persecution, with low levels of education and limited prospects.”
The minors can be ordered to work in part to pay back their travel costs. The Europol report described the illegal activities they have been found to be engaged in include working in cannabis factories, drugs trafficking and prostitution, while others were discovered in nail salons.
While there has been little coverage in France of the activities in the country of what appears to be vast pan-European trafficking networks, elsewhere journalists have reported the disappearances of Vietnamese children from social care structures in several EU countries (examples include at least 60 in the Netherlands between 2014-2019, 44 in Belgium, and many more in the UK). The reporting notably includes widespread investigations by a team of European journalists behind the project ‘Lost in Europe', and which suggests that national police forces are only too aware of the extent of the problem but employ insufficient means to deal with it.
In France, Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport comes under the judicial jurisdiction of the prosecution services based in Bobigny. Interviewed shortly before the introduction in mid-March of the lockdown on public movement to contain the Covid-19 epidemic, Bobigny public prosecutor Fabienne Klein-Donati confirmed to Mediapart that unaccompanied Vietnamese minors brought to the attention of the PAF border police at the airport “systematically abscond from their place of care within the 48 hours after their release from the ‘waiting zone’”. The children were, she said, “in all likelihood collected by slavery networks and contacted by telephone as soon as their exit from the ‘waiting zone’”.
Prosecutor Klein-Donati added that several French investigations into the networks were either completed or ongoing. These include a case now due for trial of members of a network arrested in two swoops during 2018, two judicial (judge-led) investigations opened in 2018 and 2019, and two ongoing preliminary probes, led by the prosecution services, launched in 2019.
A journalist from the investigative Dutch public radio (VPRO) programme Argos, and who has herself reported on the disappearances of Vietnamese minors arriving in Europe, provided Investigate Europe, while preparing this report, with court documents from a January 2019 trial in the Netherlands centred on two cases of Vietnamese minor smuggling via Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. The documents detail how, at the end of 2016, traffickers picked up eight children after their release by the PAF from the airport ‘waiting zone’, when they were taken north-east in a Dutch-registered vehicle to the France-Belgium border. Another group of minors was taken to a hideaway in Villiers-le-Bel, about ten kilometres from the airport, before also being taken to the Belgian border. An undercover police operation later traced the children to a cannabis factory.
The court documents state that “the French police identified a flow of Vietnamese migrants exploiting the Roissy airport since September 2016”. That date was before French social workers Sophie and Dominique had themselves begun noticing the disappearances, which raises the question of what the authorities in France did over the intervening years to protect the children.
“The prosecution services have devised a solution with the ASE 93 [the local office of the children’s social service agency where Sophie and Dominique work] and the national unit for the placement of unaccompanied minors,” said Bobigny prosecutor Fabienne Klein-Donati. “On their leaving the ‘waiting zone’, the prosecution services contact the unit for a placement far from the Île-de-France [greater Paris region].” Asked how many children had been placed in care well away from the capital, Klein-Donati replied that she had no precise figure to hand. “It’s a case-by-case process,” she said.
“The fact that unaccompanied minors abscond from where they have been placed is, whatever their nationality, a reality whatever the location or type of placement, [in] a hostel or foster family,” added the prosecutor. “Given the lack of places, a section of the minors are put in hotels, and so absconding is all the easier.”
She said the “principal question” was “why is the Seine-Saint-Denis département left on its own in face of looking after unaccompanied minors who arrive in [large] numbers and who all have, regardless of origin, important problems?”
By December 31st 2019, the local ASE social services agency was in charge of 1,263 cases of foreign minors, which is below its official capacity. Meanwhile, sources confirm, Vietnamese children continue today to vanish after arriving in France at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, lost to a miserable fate.
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If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our highly secure platform please go to https://www.frenchleaks.fr/ which is presented in both English and French.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse