With the Ministry of Health’s bill to protect minors from tobacco and alcohol products, the amendment by the Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family on semi -autonomous living units was passed yesterday in Parliament.

By presenting the amendment earlier, the responsible Minister, Domna Michaelidou, had said that the units of semi -autonomous living were established by Law 4837/2021: “It is the opportunity to give older children, who are currently hosted by prosecutor’s order to remove their biological family in child protection units, over fifteen years old, to be de -instituted.” said Mrs. Michaelidou and continued: “One in four children, who are in child protection units today, is over the age of fifteen and we do not want to spend the rest of their minor life in the Faronian Foundations. So we have created for this reason the units of semi -autonomous living, in which two to four children live over the age of fifteen in apartments in urban tissue, so that together with social workers, together with carers they can have a much more formal rather than institutional development. “

“This”he added, “We did it for two reasons. One is that we have no connections to these ages. According to the optimal interest of children, which is reflected by the reports of social workers and psychologists within child protection units, these children are often best not to be linked to a family over the age of fifteen, but also what we see is that we do not have too many requests for our children.

The second reason is that it is much healthier according to child protection experts for children staying in such small structures and not – at least – in barrel structures, which have been made to serve the needs of other times, needs of orphaned children and not children, which are basically neglected.

‘So’ ended up, “With this amendment we ask for bodies that the Ministry of Immigration Policy and Asylum supervise and have chronic experience in hosting minors to be able to implement semi -autonomous living units for children only in the register of the Ministry of Social Cohesion.”