Europe Letter: ‘One hundred Ukrainian orphans arrived in the care of one adult’

Midway through a conversation with Dubravka Suica, vice-president of the European Commission, the Croatian centre-right politician said something unexpected.

I had been invited to her office to discuss a child protection policy she is spearheading, and had just asked her about risk to children fleeing Ukraine, who make up half of all the 6.6 million refugees.

“I was a migrant myself,” Suica said. “I was in shelters for three months with my daughter, who was eight years old at that moment. We were hiding in the shelters, in Dubrovnik fortresses. No gas... No telephones, no water. We couldn’t shower. No food in the end.”

This was during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia, and from which the independent Croatia emerged.

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“Europe didn’t want to help,” she continued. “They wanted Yugoslavia to stay together, they didn’t want these countries to be independent. But little by little we won, by military means, unfortunately.”

Suica escaped from Dubrovnik harbour by boat and travelled with her daughter to Vienna, where she had a brother. In time, she returned home and resumed her job as a teacher. She became a local councillor working on education issues and then Dubrovnik’s first woman mayor, before serving in the national and EU parliaments. She was nominated Croatia’s European Commissioner in 2019.

Hanging in her office in the Berlaymont building are photographs of Croatia and Dubrovnik, which happen to show the fortifications in which she and her daughter once sheltered.

‘Black hole’

After gaining its independence, Croatia joined Nato and became the European Union’s newest member state in 2013; it is set to adopt the euro in January.

Suica wants the other countries that were once within Yugoslavia to have the same prospect.

“I think personally that Europe will not be complete without having these Western Balkans countries, because there is a huge black hole in the heart of Europe,” Suica said.

The growth of Eurosceptic politics, democratic backsliding, and corrupt use of EU funds in newer member states such as Hungary, which joined the EU in 2004, soured many western European governments towards the idea of further enlargement. Talks with potential candidate countries were stalled, despite significant concessions such as North Macedonia changing its name to settle a dispute with Greece.

But the geopolitics of enlargement have been revived by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has illustrated why joining the EU is such a potent dream. It has led to appeals from Kyiv and neighbouring Moldova, which is also threatened by Russian encroachment, for a fast-track process to bring them under the European umbrella.

Suica’s brief as commission vice-president is democracy and demography, which includes child-protection policies. The risks to Ukrainian refugees were illustrated to her when, on a visit to a refugee reception centre on the Polish border, 100 children arrived in a group after a 36-hour train journey.

“Only one adult person was accompanying 100 young children who were orphans, from an orphanage,” she said. “I will never forget this scene.”

The child protection portfolio puts Suica in charge of proposals for new EU legislation to combat online child sexual abuse that have run into opposition from privacy campaigners.

Child abuse

Under the proposal, national courts would be able to issue a “detection order” to online communication providers such as Facebook, requiring them to use scanning software on all user messages to detect child-abuse material.

The results of the scan would then be passed to a new EU centre dedicated to combating child abuse, where officials would sort through the messages to remove “false positives” accidentally picked up by the scan, and forward the rest to law enforcement.

It’s not hard to see a potential clash with the current position of the European Court of Justice, which has ruled repeatedly that personal data-like messages cannot be indiscriminately retained and accessed for law enforcement purposes, but can only be gathered for a specific individual identified in an investigation, or a small geographic location. The only exemption is an immediate and concrete threat to national security, which allows for time-limited blanket retention.

This was the crux of the successful ECJ challenge by convicted murderer Graham Dwyer to the data retention practices used by the Garda to build the case against him.

Suica admits that a “big task is in front of us” to persuade members of the European Parliament to back the proposal.

“We have to decide what is more important,” she says. “Data protection and privacy? Or sexual-abuse crime.”