This edited collection offers a comprehensive and timely analysis of the recently introduced EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, with a particular focus on safeguards for unaccompanied migrant children. It critically examines how the Pact addresses, or fails to address, existing vulnerabilities for unaccompanied minors within the broader architecture of migration and border management. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it draws on insights from legal, criminological, sociological, and public policy scholarship, providing a nuanced assessment of the protection mechanisms, or lack thereof, afforded to this especially vulnerable group.
Drawing on national contexts across the European Union and the United Kingdom, the chapters combine country-specific analyses that reveal both shared structural challenges and important jurisdictional differences in the treatment of minors. The volume engages in a critical manner with the Pact’s broader shift towards accelerated, differentiated, and security-oriented migration governance, exploring how these developments reshape evolving systems of protection for children on the move. It interrogates the tensions generated by this transformation, particularly the challenge of reconciling migration control objectives with the protection and promotion of children’s rights. It further assesses the adequacy of procedural safeguards, questioning whether the new framework meaningfully addresses persistent gaps in protection and care.
Bringing together contributions from scholars across multiple jurisdictions, the collection offers diverse, empirically grounded, and analytically informed perspectives on the implications of the Pact for unaccompanied minors. It encourages forward-looking engagement with the legal, ethical and practical challenges arising from the new framework, while providing one of the first comprehensive critical assessments of its likely impact prior to full operationalisation.
Contributing to broader debates on migration management, child protection, and fundamental rights in Europe, this collection’s intended readership extends beyond specialists in migration and asylum law to scholars and students, policymakers, practitioners, as well as international and non-governmental organisations working with vulnerable migrant populations and unaccompanied migrant children in particular.
