Investigations into missing migrant children win the 2024 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism

An investigation into the disappearance of more than 50,000 migrant children has won the European Parliament’s 2024 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism.

Led by Dutch journalist Geesje van Haren, the “Lost in Europe” project found that since 2021, an average of almost 47 migrant children arriving in Europe are missing per day.

Van Haren told Euronews that many of these missing children are victims of human trafficking or are involved in the EU’s crackdown on people smuggling gangs.

“Many children are also caught at the borders and end up in prison for human smuggling while they themselves were smuggled. For underage children, the EU war against human smuggling works in reverse. Many underage children are adults imprisoned because of this,” Van Haren explained.

“We know that our policing system and the system are not capable of protecting these children. And we also know that there is a lot of pressure on the police teams who have to investigate this. But there is also a lot of pressure on the police who have to investigate drugs. And most of the time human trafficking is also related to the work of the drug staff,” she added.

Documentation error

The investigation also uncovered significant inconsistencies in documentation and reporting in 31 countries, including Austria, Germany and Italy, raising concerns that the true number of missing children may be higher.

The latest findings are based on research carried out as part of an initial investigation in 2021, which found that more than 18,000 migrant children went missing in Europe between 2018 and 2020.

“We spoke to NGOs and experts from the field. They say this is just the tip of the iceberg that 51,433 children were missing. The last time we conducted this investigation, only 18,000 children were missing in 2021,” Geesje van Haren told Euronews.

She adds that the team also had difficulty accessing data from some countries, with France providing no response at all and Spain claiming that it does not differentiate between adults and minors in its data.

However, van Haren hopes that the new EU migration and asylum agreement will make data collection more stringent, which could lead to even more missing children being uncovered in the future.

Lost in Europe began investigating stories of missing or “lost” migrant children after a former Europol chief of staff made comments in 2016 saying that more than 10,000 migrant children had disappeared in Europe at that time.

The Lost in Europe team plans to launch a new investigation in three years.