Angel Victor Torres (Arucas, Gran Canaria, 58 years old), Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, has been negotiating for months with the Government of the Canary Islands for a legal reform so that the autonomous communities are obliged by law to share the reception of unaccompanied minors. But on Wednesday, during the Sectoral Conference on Children held in Tenerife, the representatives of the PP communities made it clear that it will not be easy for the reform to pass in Congress with the votes of the popular people. Torres confirms in any case that the intention of the PSOE and Sumar is to register the text this Monday, if possible together with the President of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo.
To ask. Are the Canary Islands destined to be the reception of more than 6,000 unaccompanied minor migrants?
Answer. Therefore [no ocurra] There is only one way out: the modification of article 35 of the Immigration Law. This is the only solution so that today, like Andalusia in 2018 or Ceuta in 2021, the Canary Islands do not have to manage the reception of unaccompanied minors on their own.
Q. It does not appear that the PP is in the process of approving this amendment to the law, and without the PP it cannot be implemented.
R. The beginning of next week will be decisive. There is a plenary session on 23 July. If we have the manifestos of the PPs, yes, it could even be approved by decree law, because then we would have enough for parliamentary validation. There are still ten key days.
Q. But they lack the necessary votes. They don't even have those of the investiture bloc. Junts demand the comprehensive delegation of immigration powers and that these minors do not reach Catalonia.
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R. That is legally and politically unacceptable and not viable.
Q. What do the Canary Islands government and the central government gain by forcing the vote in Congress?
R. We are not forcing it. We are concluding a process that began seven months ago. I resist the idea that we should look for solutions other than the only possible ones. The others are palliative measures. It cannot be that an area, because it is a border, is condemned to be the area that must receive all minors, because that is stated in the Constitution and in the statutes of autonomy. Today is the time for a historic debate, to say that we must change the laws so that this does not happen.
Q. The PP and Vox governments have passed laws of agreement to suppress the word dictatorship, not to remove Franco symbols, they have passed laws against sexist violence… What is your interpretation of the collapse of their governments in light of the reception of a few dozen unaccompanied minor migrants?
R. It is astonishing that what is dividing the right and the far right is the reaction to some boys and girls. Both groups show a lack of solidarity… Vox refuses to take in 340 minors in the whole country, but it seems perfect that 6,000 remain in the Canary Islands. And the PP is not able to approve a change in the law to distribute 3,000 minors throughout the Spanish territory. The disintegration is good news for society as a whole.
Q. The the breakup of PP and Vox in their autonomous governments Does it open a window of opportunity?
R. The PP must prove that it is a party of the state. We have put on the table a definitive solution for the present and the future, for every community that is under the pressure that the Canary Islands are experiencing today. If the rest of the communities want to say that they are as saturated as the Islands, there must be 130,000 unaccompanied migrant children in the rest of Spain, while there are 15,000. Now the PP has a unique opportunity to distance itself from those who have been its partners by taking logical decisions: also break with Vox in the city councils where they govern and say yes to the change in the law for the reception of minors in all the autonomous communities. . Now the PP has the chance to correct things they have said today, such as the proposal to use the navy against the Cayucos or to reconsider the so-called 'laws of agreement' with which they have repealed several autonomous laws of democratic memory.
Q. You say that reforming the law is the final solution, isn't that very ambitious?
R. For lack of a better initiative, This is what we understand as answers for what has not yet been achieved in total [crisis] previous. That's why I say it's a definitive solution for a border area, so that they know that these minors are not all going to stay on their territory. You don't just feed them; they have to be educated, compulsory education has to be controlled, they have to have tutoring until they are of age, in some communities even until they are 21 years old… Until another is discovered, this is the best possible solution.
Q. Should the solidarity of the autonomous communities be compulsory and not voluntary?
R. If the voluntary system worked, we wouldn't be talking about changing the law some. History is there to learn from and not to repeat mistakes. Since 1999, in the Canary Islands we have been dealing with a migration phenomenon that we know well, since the first two immigrants, who came from the Sahara, arrived on the island of Lanzarote. Since then we have had different flows, it is cyclical. Neither in 2006, nor in 2018, nor in 2022 were there responses to communities that were crying out for a solution. It happened in Ceuta, in Melilla, in Andalusia, in the Levant and now in the Canary Islands.
Q. He talks about applying the legislative reform to any area that is saturated. In principle, the legislative reform includes Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands, but can it also be applied to other areas such as Andalusia?
R. If Andalusia were under pressure like the Canary Islands currently are, the relevant change in the law could undoubtedly be implemented. Andalusia faced this pressure in 2018, with 50% of minors being unaccompanied, because the route [migratoria] then it was across the Street. Then a royal decree was approved that even stimulated communities that welcomed unaccompanied minors from Andalusia with 25% more economic resources, and the mechanism did not work because it depended on the voluntariness of the rest of the communities. That is why I maintain: the only solution is for the minors to be distributed throughout the country through a regulated procedure.
Q. How is it possible to tackle such a sensitive, complex and multifaceted subject without even having reliable data? It is not known how many children each autonomous community has taken in.
R. The Sectoral Conference on Children should establish by consensus the capacity that each community should have to welcome minors. The Valencian Community confirms that it is saturated with a thousand minors: to be able to say that it is exerting the same pressure as the Canary Islands today, it would have to have 15,000 minors. It should be established what the minimum capacity is that the different communities have: but it is the border areas, Ceuta, Melilla, Andalusia, the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, that will experience that migratory pressure.
Q. You say that there is no plan B in case the legislative reform is not approved, but the Canary Islands are on the border. Does the State have the capacity to intervene urgently? enabling military facilitieswhich he has denied so far, or the injection of money?
R. Logically, there would be palliative measures that the government could take, but I refuse to think that the solution is not to change the law. Why can't we succeed in changing the law?
Q. In the transfers of adults carried out by the Ministry of Migration to the Peninsula, there have been hundreds of cases in which it is suspected that these adults are minors.
R. There is a protocol and there are civil and criminal responsibilities for the fact that you allow a minor to travel through the territory without guardianship, and therefore the role of the coroner, the role of the prosecutor, the role of the observer, of the doctor… It often happens that an adult person says that he is a minor, because that person does not want to be deported. And the opposite could happen, that he says that he is older when he is younger, because he wants to go to Belgium, to France, where he has his family. These two realities exist.
Q. Will the government compensate the children who turned out to be minors and were transferred from the Canary Islands?
R. If they were transferred as adults, the law was broken, or that's what I just said. That's not true, and I deny that [Alberto Núñez] Feijóo is that minors are bussed to the airports to take them to the peninsula and leave them to their fate in the parks. This is illegal and an absolute hoax.
Q. If the amendment is approved, do you think it will be sufficiently protected so that there will be no cascade of appeals to the Constitutional Court?
R. At the sectoral conference, there were interventions about the invasion of regional powers. The legal services of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, if it was a decree law, had some doubts because they were autonomous powers, but as a bill we understand that its constitutionality is preserved. Now I don’t know if someone can go to the Constitutional Court for a jurisdiction that they understood was autonomous and could be invaded. What we would like is for it to go through with the majority of votes of the 350 deputies of Congress.
Q. If the amendment to the law is not approved, could this lead to the break-up of the coalition government between the Canary Coalition and the PP and, as an alternative, could there be a government between the Canary Coalition and the PSOE?
R. It is clear that if this does not work, minors in the Canary Islands will have a huge problem because their rights are being violated. The government that manages the Canary Islands has no infrastructure, no resources, no spaces and logically the president of the Canary Islands has a problem. But that will happen when it has to happen. My political organization does not intend to destabilize anything, on the contrary.