First 'jungle' camp minors arrive in UK from Calais

Fourteen unaccompanied minors have been transferred from the 'jungle' migrant camp in Calais to the UK.

The minors, whose ages and identities have not been revealed, are the first of a group eligible to be in the UK because they have close relatives there.

Officials from the Home Office are spending the coming week at the migrant camp in Calais attempting to identify unaccompanied minors eligible to come to the UK.

After months of delay and confusion, Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced last week that she wanted to see as many children as possible brought to the UK before the camp closes.

The French authorities were due to begin dismantling the settlement this week but have now delayed the process, in part to allow for the UK to extract eligible minors.

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Under EU legislation, any asylum seeker who is under 18, unaccompanied, and who has a parent, sibling or grandparent in the UK, is entitled to be reunited with their family.

Under separate new legislation, known as the Dubbs Amendment, the Government has also pledged to take in some unaccompanied minors who do not have relations in Britain.

The process of identifying eligible minors is fraught with complications.

Most of the them are not young children but teenagers - 16, 17 and 18-year-olds - many without passports or other ID.

Proving their age, their claim to be travelling alone and the existence of their relatives in the UK is extremely hard.

The charity Safe Passage has been working to try to compile a database of the minors for several months. The process is hard because none of the 'jungle' residents are registered and the population is transient.

In July, Safe Passage gave the Home Office a list of 178 minors who all claimed to have family in UK. None of them were transferred to Britain and the charity says it has now lost track of 18 of them.

Estimates of the current camp population vary widely - from 6000 to more than 10,000. According to French charity Terre d'Asile, there are 1290 unaccompanied minors living there.

Accuracy is extremely hard because migrants arrive daily from southern Europe and leave for the UK hidden on trucks.

There is also a vested interest by the migrants to give inaccurate information to boost their asylum chances.

The French government has said that the camp will be closed by the end of the year and that everyone will be moved to asylum processing centres dotted around France.

However there are not yet enough spaces in the new centres and lone minors can not legally be placed in them.

Furthermore, as the dismantlement date approaches, Sky News has seen evidence of new camps growing elsewhere in Northern France.