L 58/1402
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
23.2.2023
COMMISSION PILOT PROJECTS
CHAPTER PP 01 — RESEARCH AND INNOVATION (cont'd) PP 01 23
(cont'd)
PP 01 23 04
(cont'd) Remarks
Based on the data available on the 29 March 2022, more than 2 000 children from 1 481 families have been reported missing in Ukraine due to the war.
Those numbers are growing by dozens on a daily basis, as the war continues.
Providing answers to every family member who has reported a child as missing, from experience of other missing children organisations with war and disaster, may take many years and will include robust family tracing procedures for every unaccompanied Ukrainian child in Europe and every orphan of war as well cooperation with the International Committee on Missing Persons who will analyse unidentified remains.
Robust and fast procedures and tools for cross border cases management across Europe are essential given that people can move freely within the Union and EEA territory.
Missing Children Europe - the European Federation for Missing and Sexually Exploited Children - is expecting the number of unaccompanied minors going missing in the Union to rapidly grow as the war continues, as more territories are being attacked, and more children become orphaned due to the war.
Under these severe circumstances, the Ukrainian organisation for missing children (a member of Missing Children Europe) struggles to support parents and children, with not access to their offices, and reliant on the use of only a mobile device, an e-mail account, and social media.
The communication with neighbouring countries, like Poland or Romania, is difficult and information can be easily lost, misplaced or be prone to human error.
In this crisis, the need for a case management system that can handle cross-border information on missing Ukrainian children is more than evident.
Although missing children organisations have a number of tools and communication means available, these are limited to local cases, the vast majority of which are runaway teens.
The 32 116000 hotlines, most of them members of Missing Children Europe, are missing a tool supporting cooperation and quick cross-border exchange of information on missing unaccompanied children via a common platform that values greatly the security and privacy of data.
The proposed Missing Children Tracker for Ukraine will leverage the power of technology to allow cross-border missing children cases be resolved, through organisation collaboration, as timely and efficiently as possible.
This pilot action exploits the research findings and the technical know-how acquired from the EU-funded Horizon2020 research project "ChildRescue" (grant agreement No 780938), establishing the required functionalities and services that can cope with cross border cases in times of desperate need.
The proposed implementation will provide a secure web platform environment, built on top of the basic prototype developed in the framework of the aforementioned Horizon 2020 initiative, for covering specific needs identified by Missing Children Europe and its response organisation in Ukraine: — reporting of missing Ukrainian children incidences and management of local and cross-border cases with the involvement of authorised organisations all around Europe; — secure sharing of cross-border cases among organisations involved, given that a child missing from Ukraine can be anywhere in Europe (not always at its own will); — transferring of existing database on cross-border cases to the unified platform; — intelligent matching of Ukrainian missing children cases based on advanced Machine Learning techniques;