Afghan Minors on the Balkan Route: When Children Risk Everything for Education and a Future
At fourteen, there should be only one obsession: going to school, building friendships, and imagining the future. Not crossing mountains at night, hiding inside trucks, or learning how to survive borders, smugglers, prisons, and pushbacks. Yet today, for many Afghan teenagers, the word "future" begins precisely there: with the "game." That is what those who travel the Balkan Route call it. An almost harmless-sounding term used to describe a journey that often resembles a prolonged suspension of human rights.
Some time ago, I met an Afghan young man who is now an adult. He speaks excellent Italian, uses formal language with remarkable ease, works part-time in a major Italian shipyard, and resumed his studies immediately after arriving in Italy. Behind his politeness and his determination to integrate, however, was a story that deeply affected me. He had completed the "game" entirely on his own when he was only fourteen years old.
He told me that he had started school in Afghanistan as a child, but that war and instability eventually made it impossible for him to continue his education. At the age of fourteen, he left Kabul. From that moment began an extremely difficult journey through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and finally Italy. Much of the journey was made on foot, amid arrests, pushbacks, and months of detention.
There is something profoundly disturbing about imagining a child crossing alone some of the most militarized and violent border regions in Europe. Yet this happens every day. Not because these young people are adventurers, but because they often see education and escape as the only alternatives to poverty, war, Taliban rule, or the complete absence of opportunities. For many Afghan adolescents, the right to education is not guaranteed in their home country, and migration becomes, paradoxically, an extreme form of self-preservation.
Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes every child's right to education. Article 22 requires States to provide special protection to refugee and asylum-seeking children. The 1951 Geneva Convention protects the right to seek international protection. Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment. Article 24 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union further establishes that the best interests of the child must be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children. Yet along the Balkan Route, these legal guarantees often appear to dissolve in the face of pushbacks, arbitrary detention, and the criminalization of migration.
His account of Bulgaria was particularly troubling. He told me that he had been arrested and detained for three months. Three months. And he was still a minor. I can hardly imagine what such detention conditions might mean for a foreign teenager, often without an interpreter, without family support, without psychological assistance, and living with the constant fear of being sent back.
The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly condemned similar situations. In M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece (2011), the Court held that degrading conditions faced by asylum seekers could amount to a violation of Article 3 of the Convention. In Rahimi v. Greece (2011), involving the detention of an Afghan minor, the Court stressed that the detention of migrant children requires particularly high standards of protection. Even more significant was Mubilanzila Mayeka and Kaniki Mitunga v. Belgium (2006), in which the Court recognized the extreme vulnerability of unaccompanied foreign minors and reaffirmed that States have enhanced positive obligations toward them.
In Sh.D. and Others v. Greece, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia (2019), a case specifically concerning Afghan minors along the Balkan Route, the Court reiterated that unaccompanied migrant children constitute an exceptionally vulnerable group and that States owe them heightened protection.
Equally important is H.A. and Others v. Greece, in which the Court found that holding migrant children in inadequate facilities or in conditions resembling detention may violate Article 3 of the Convention. The judgment emphasized that even relatively short periods of deprivation of liberty can have severe psychological consequences for unaccompanied minors.
In Popov v. France, the Court further clarified that the vulnerability of migrant children requires a significantly higher level of protection than that afforded to adults. Even a few days spent in secure or detention-like environments may cause profound psychological harm.
Another landmark judgment is Tarakhel v. Switzerland, where the Court described asylum-seeking children as an "extremely vulnerable" category and stressed that European States cannot ignore the risk of degrading treatment within reception and detention systems.
The Court's case law concerning collective expulsions and immigration detention also demonstrates how European legal standards have often collided with practices on the ground. In Khlaifia and Others v. Italy, the Court reaffirmed that any deprivation of liberty must have a clear legal basis, be proportionate, and be accompanied by effective procedural safeguards. These principles become even more important when the person detained is a child.
Meanwhile, organizations such as UNICEF, UNHCR, and Human Rights Watch continue to document systematic abuses along the Balkan Route: beatings, confiscation of mobile phones, deprivation of food, unlawful pushbacks, and detention conditions incompatible with international standards for child protection.
There is also a question that Europe too often avoids confronting. If a fourteen-year-old boy is willing to travel thousands of kilometers alone, endure months of uncertainty, and even face imprisonment simply to study and work legally, then perhaps we should reflect more seriously on the desperation that lies behind such a decision. Public debate too often reduces migrants to numbers, arrivals, or security concerns. Yet behind these abstract categories are teenagers who, while their European peers prepare schoolbags for another day of classes, are crossing forests, militarized borders, and detention centers.
Perhaps the most powerful part of this story is its present. That Afghan boy who undertook the "game" at fourteen now studies, works, and speaks Italian with remarkable respect and precision. He is living proof of how superficial it is to portray migrants solely as a social problem. Many of them are simply asking for what every adolescent should have without risking their life: education, safety, and dignity.
The reality is that no child should be forced to earn these rights by crossing prisons, violence, and borders. When this happens, the failure does not belong to the child who flees. It belongs to an international system that has normalized the idea that a fourteen-year-old must cross half a continent alone in order to have a chance at a future.
Related posts:
Serbia’s Food Delivery Riders: Exploitation, Migrant Labor and the Balkan Route
Piazza del Mondo in Trieste: A Mixed Couple Between Asylum Law, Integration and Civil Resistance
Afghanistan, Asylum Law and the Balkan Route: When Protection Becomes Intermittent
Balkan Route and Asylum Law: A Migrant's Story from Pakistan to Italy
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