Ceuta's Unaccompanied Minors Face Abuse Amid Europe's Migration Policy Gap

Ceuta, a Spanish territory on the northern tip of Africa, hosts hundreds of unaccompanied migrant minors — many from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa — who live in informal street settlements after exhausting or bypassing official reception capacity. DW reporting documents systematic exposure to physical abuse, sexual exploitation, and recruitment into petty crime networks. Spanish law requires these children to receive state care, but reception centres are overcrowded and many minors avoid registration out of fear of deportation or family separation.

The structural problem is that Ceuta functions as a pressure valve at the EU's external border: Spain manages the immediate arrivals, but EU burden-sharing mechanisms have consistently failed to distribute responsibility for unaccompanied minors across member states. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, agreed in 2024, contains solidarity provisions — but implementation timelines run to 2026, and child-specific relocation mechanisms remain the weakest part of the agreement. The minors on Ceuta's streets are experiencing the consequences of a governance gap that member states have chosen to leave open.

Watch whether Spain formally invokes EU emergency mechanisms ahead of the Pact's implementation date, and whether any member state voluntarily accepts relocation of unaccompanied minors from Ceuta — the latter would be a genuine signal of political will on child migration.