Letter to the President about homeless children

Just recently, on April 20, I sent a letter to President Ilham Aliyev in connection with the growing, in my opinion, problem of homeless children. There was no answer, no reaction, which could be expressed in the revitalization of the state to work with these children.

There are two factors that caused me to appeal to the President:  the first factor is the growing number of street children, and the second, the lack of a unified state and coordination center to address the problems of homeless and troubled children.

Non-governmental organizations that deal with this problem has completely stopped their activities, or function partially due to the tightening the activity of foreign donors in Azerbaijan. Almost 80 juvenile NGOs entering the NGO Alliance for Child Rights has been paralyzed. There is not financial or political support from the state. According to the juvenile NGOs, there are about 2 million homeless and difficult children. According to official statistics, there are about 4,000. Operational research has revealed that government agencies related to the topic of the homeless and troubled children are ineffective due to lack of a uniform policy and a single administration.

About all this and proposals in a letter to the president:

Dear Mr. President,

Recently, I personally had to deal with street children at the age from 12 to 17 years. They can be divided into two groups: taking tranquilizers are children older than 15 years, and do not use them.

Inquiries revealed that they live on the street for the following reasons:

-Parents or one parent is in prison;

-Parents are drunk;

-Parents died, and relatives do not take them to the family;

-Discord in the family;

Prompt investigation showed that the number of such children is great, and it grows.

There are various government agencies that deal with such children within their competences:

- the Interior  Ministry

- State Committee For Family, Women and Children

- Ministry of Education

-The Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare

- Commission for Juvenile and  their protection  under the chief executive powers.

- Commission For minors and protection of their rights under the Cabinet of Ministers.

However, their activity is ineffective due to the narrowness of the tasks they perform. All of them are aware of the problem, but do not make efforts to effectively address it. This is evidenced by:

- the presence of street children

- the fact that these departments  are aware of the problem

- lack of initiatives to address the problem.

For example, we tried to pass the state committee four children. The State Committee handed them over to the NGO "Ümid yeri" (Place of Hope), which serves as a temporary shelter, but that is not an institution for rehabilitation and determining the status of adolescents. As a result, less than in a day, the children again found themselves on the street.

The situation calls for the creation of public institutions that directly and efficiently deal with the problem of homeless and troubled children.

Due to the problem, we propose the following measures:

-to adopt a government program or plan of action to address the problem

- create a central coordinating body for troubled children

- create a children's rehabilitation center (its  competence is to gather information about the situation, taking kids off the streets by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and others, such as volunteers, to determine the causes of their homelessness,  sending them to family or the relevant state institutions - boarding school, an orphanage, a special institution.)

- create an Institution of ombudsman for children, which will head the coordinating body for troubled children, as well as a rehabilitation center.

- to organize public and international support for non-governmental organizations dealing with children, in particular rehabilitation. Unfortunately, some of them ceased operations, or works in part because of lack of funding.

Sincerely,

Mehman Aliyev, Director of Turan Information Agency