Brussels, 20 February 2024
Yesterday, Vice-President Dubravka Šuica travelled to Poland for a series of meetings, including with the Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy Dziemianowicz-Bąk, high-level representatives from the Polish Ministries for Justice, Interior and Foreign Affairs, Ukrainian Federal and Odesa oblast authorities, representatives of the United States Embassies in Poland, and the UNICEF Deputy Regional Director.
The aim of this mission was to unblock all political obstacles related to the relocation of the remaining 309 Ukrainian children from Hotel Ossa in Poland, as well as to facilitate additional child protection measures, access to education, healthcare, psycho-social support for the evacuated groups of children from Ukrainian institutions hosted in Poland. The Vice-President´s mission helped reach a political agreement by all stakeholders involved, to ensure the relocation of Ukrainian children in other locations in Poland to smaller and more suitable houses and care, to identify and support new homes across the country, and a commitment to enrol all Ukrainian children evacuated form institutions in the Polish national education system, while following online Ukrainian schooling. This hybrid educational model will be developed jointly by Polish and Ukrainian authorities, supported by UNICEF. What started out as a pilot project to support children evacuated from Ukrainian institutions to Poland, a vast majority of them without parental care, is now becoming a blueprint for deinstitutionalisation of Ukrainian children to more appropriate community-based care, in line with EU standards, also in the context of the ongoing comprehensive child care reform inside Ukraine.
Vice-President Dubravka Šuica also visited the new homes in Łódź. The mission concluded with a meeting with the Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, where the discussion centred on how to best navigate demographic challenges in Poland through concrete measures such as improved access to pre-school childcare and affordable housing for young families, also in the context of the EU’s demography toolbox.
Source – EU Commission