LAUNCESTON College students have written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid, asking him to change the rules so that more child refugees can be reunited with their families, and to ensure families are kept together.

The college has been working for several years with Unicef, which has a campaign called ‘Stand With Refugee Children‘ — Unicef too is asking the Home Secretary to ‘fix the law that is keeping families apart’.

Unicef’s petition states: “Right now, across the world, children are being forced to make dangerous journeys to Europe to reach their family in the UK. This is because the UK’s family reunion refugee law doesn’t consider their siblings, grandparents, aunts or uncles family. We call on you to change the definition of family within the UK’s refugee family reunion law.”

Launceston’s college students have added their voices to the campaign, with a humanities class giving a presentation on May 4, which was attended by North Cornwall Conservative MP Scott Mann.

Among others in attendance were Jessica Bool, youth development strategy lead at Unicef, who had travelled from London to see the presentation, a representative of Launceston Rotary Club, chair of the Launceston Refugee Support Group Frances Tippett, parents and staff.

Launceston Refugee Support Group’s aim is to resettle two Syrian refugee families in Launceston, following the Bude Refugee Support Group’s success in attaining Home Office approval to resettle two refugee families in their community.

Students explained that through their research, they had learned child refugees are making dangerous journeys, and have to leave everything behind, ‘often losing family members on the journey to survival’.

They said as many as 28-million young children are missing out on their human rights and have the status of ‘refugee’ because they have been indirectly involved in conflict, war, violence, terrorism or famine.

The class has also learnt about the conditions many refugees live in, often living in overcrowded, unclean or unsafe camps.

While in these camps, children are vulnerable to trafficking and kidnapping. They also have little to no education and don’t always have the security needed to play and live safely.

The students have been taught about Unicef’s campaign to have the Articles 10 and 22 made laws.

Article 22 states that the Government should do everything in its power to help swiftly reunite children with family members living in the UK.

The students explained as part of their presentation that currently, it can take long periods of time for refugee children living in camps to be released to family already in the country. Article 10 states that family definition should be extended to include aunts, uncles, grandparents and older siblings.

Once the class had been taught about this they decided to do something about it, so they joined the Unicef campaign to help make Articles 10 and 22 laws. As well preparing the presentation, they created posters on the situation the refugees are in and designed their own ‘Blue Dot Centres’, which are Unicef camps for refugees.

They have written letters to Mr Javid, adding: “We would like our Government to publicly commit to changing the UK’s rules on refugee family reunion by widening the definition of family to include adult siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Please help us make Articles 10 and 22 become law. Every child deserves a chance at life.

“We look forward to welcoming a Syrian family to our community and school one day.”

Mr Mann said on receiving the letters and petition, with more than 300 signatures: “I give you my word, I will go to Sajid on Tuesday. I will make a point of taking a beeline to the Home Secretary’s office and making him aware of the presentation and envelopes given to me.”

Certificates were then presented to all of the students by Mr Mann and Ms Bool, acknowledging their hard work on the topic over the last few months.

Ms Bool said: “The progress we are making is only because of the passion and compassion of people like you.”

Unicef has an online petition, ‘keeping families together’, available at www.unicef.org.uk/keeping-families-together-petition/