Last month, the Inter-American Dialogue and the Organization of American States (OAS) Department of Social Inclusion released their “Guide of Good Practices for the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Children on the Move in the Americas.” KIND, as a leading expert in the protection of children on the move, contributed to the guide with a good practice focusing on the protection of unaccompanied children and facilitation of family reunification (pages 79-85). The audience for the guide is government policy makers, UN organizations, civil society organizations, and others who work with unaccompanied and separated children.
The guide, available in Spanish, provides a wide range of good practices in a number of areas that can help better protect unaccompanied children, including access to education and health care, the training of government migration officials on the safety and care needs of these children , measures to protect children from trafficking and smuggling, family reunification, information and data collection, and solutions to address a lack of documentation. One of the goals of the guide is to inspire the translation of international and inter-American child protection frameworks into concrete actions.
KIND’s Vice President and Country Director for Mexico Alejandra Macias Delgadillo said, “This guide is an important tool that represents the best practices in the region for the protection of the human rights of children on the move. KIND is honored to have been included.”
On February 26, at the online launch event for the guide, Alejandra joined other distinguished panelists and presented KIND’s holistic legal and psychosocial care model for unaccompanied children. She focused on KIND’s family reunification work during the family separation crisis, which began in 2018 and provided a transnational response to complex cases. She emphasized that KIND’s model could be replicated in other countries and that collaboration among the governments should be encouraged to develop immigration policies that prioritize the welfare of children and facilitate family reunification.
Manual Orozco, Director of the Migration, Remittances and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, stated,
The practices presented in the guide, which are fundamentally based on the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, contain important lessons learned that we need to promote because they help us understand the complexity of the problems. And we need to have a better understanding of what is happening, especially amid the current circumstances of this moment where we have the politicization of migration and the effects this is having on children and adolescents.
Director of the Department of Social Inclusion at OAS Betilde Muñoz-Pogossian, spoke about the need to “continue building knowledge and solidarity to implement policies for this vulnerable and important group of children and adolescents on the move.”
The guide builds on the efforts of the Working Group for Migrant Children, convened by the Inter-American Dialogue since 2022, and on the commitments of the Declaration for the Protection and Integration of Migrant and Refugee Children and Adolescents in the Americas, adopted in 2023.
KIND is proud to contribute to these regional and global policy efforts and to be a leading voice on the protection of unaccompanied children.
