The disappearance of 500 Albanian children

The issue of Albanian missing children was brought to the Greek parliament from the deputy of the Democratic Left Maria Gianakou, after concerns that were mentioned in a report last year, from the UN Committee Against Torture.

The committee has requested that Athens has to open an investigation on the case when 502 of 661 Roma children from Albania, disappeared from the state institution within four years, to cooperate with Albanian authorities in order to shed light on this issue and to determine the legal responsibilities of those involved in this scandal.

Only in 2004 the Greek authorities have published a report on the disappearance of Albanian children and in 2007 all the file with the documents of this case has been presented to state authorities. But since then it has remained a forgotten issue and closed in the drawer. Justice Minister Harallambos Athanasiou has asked the judicial authorities to immediately make known in what stage the investigation are and responded to parliament that soon there will be a wider information for the entire procedure from the relevant authorities.

The scandal of disappearance of 502 children from the Albanian Benefactor Institute “Varvara Agjia” was discovered by the international organization “The Swiss Terre Des Hommens” in 2003. Once the UN was shocked by this discovery, the Commissioner Zhan Migel Peti was sent to Greece, but more than ten years after this scandal is almost closed.

The data for this organization suggest that there are also many other similar cases in Greece, where in the past 15 years have entered the country illegally, over 3,800 Albanian children, of whom more than a quarter is never found.

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