The main objectives of the Pacaraima Mission of the Public Defender's Office of the Union are to:

• Ensure the safe, regular and orderly entry of persons into Brazilian territory, including legal assistance to migrants at the border with information and the guarantee of migration rights, migration regularization of separated and unaccompanied children and adolescents, and prevention of situations of undue rejection.
• Prevent, especially with regard to undocumented children and adolescents or those separated from their parents, the crime of human trafficking.
• Ensure access to rights.

The DPU is an institution that has 71 units distributed throughout the states of Brazil and is responsible for providing legal guidance and promoting human rights and the defense, at all levels, judicial and extrajudicial, of individual and collective rights, in full and free of charge.

The DPU has the Working Group on Migration, Statelessness, and Refugees, which coordinates and articulates actions in the area of migration, made up of members from all regions of Brazil and focal points in all states. However, the institution faces important challenges in covering the entire national territory, especially at border points, such as the cities of Tabatinga, Oiapoque and Pacaraima. DPU missions are envisaged as one of the possible solutions for reaching locations where there is no DPU headquarters.

The Municipality of Pacaraima, which is located at the border point between Brazil and Venezuela, about 215 km away from Boa Vista, is the capital of the State of Roraima, and is connected only by a federal road. In this way, most of the Venezuelan migratory flow that enters Brazil by land passes through Pacaraima (ROCHA, 2019, p. 354). The activities of Operation Reception, an instance of humanitarian support and emergency assistance carried out by the federal government, with the support of international cooperation agencies and civil society entities, began in 2018.

In this context, the DPU established a mission in Pacaraima to provide immediate assistance in different legal migration situations that occur at the border. It established a rotating system in which defenders from all over Brazil participated, ensuring the permanent presence of two defenders, every day of the week, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

During the work of the mission, it was evident that there were problems for the access of migrant children and adolescents to the right to education. The reports received showed specific barriers to exercising the right to education, such as the lack of vacancies, problems due to documentary requirements of the country of origin, sworn translation of previous schooling documentation, and enrollment in inappropriate grades and school stages. Added to this, it is relevant to mention that in the initial planning of the Reception Operation no special attention was paid to educational inclusion and no actions were designed to strengthen the municipal school network. The education system in Pacaraima had to face a significant increase in demand, without strengthening its physical infrastructure or hiring more teachers (Key Informant 1, 2021).

Under this scenario, the DPU began to monitor access to the right to education through dialogue with different actors linked to the issue, such as the municipal and state education secretariats, UN agencies, schools, etc. The DPU sent letters and recommendations to different institutions and bodies, participated in meetings and joined, since January 2019, the Education Working Group formed in the city of Pacaraima to discuss and advance in the area of education.

The experience acquired by the Pacaraima Mission and the identification of different gaps and problems for access to education led the DPU to prepare a request for recommendation to the National Council of Education, requesting the standardization at the national level of minimum criteria for the inclusion of migrant children and adolescents in the public education system. The recommendation culminated in Resolution CNE/CEB 1/2020 of the National Education Council of 2020, which for the first time addresses the issue of migrant children at the national level.

The regulatory changes in favor of migrant children and adolescents that exist in the country today were at the initiative of the DPU, mainly thanks to the Pacaraima Mission (Key Informant 1, 2021).

The mission had to suspend operations in March 2020, with the closure of borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on Ordinance No. 120 of March 17, 2020, Brazil determined the exceptional and temporary restriction of entry by the land border to the country of non-nationals from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This restriction was extended by subsequent ordinances, such as the recent Ordinance No. 652, of January 25, 2021.

In 2021, the DPU created a structure called the Specialized Thematic Committee to address the issues of Roraima, with the proposal based on the experience of the Pacaraima Mission and the impossibility of maintaining a fixed team in a context in which the borders are closed, to seek forms of positive advocacy. It is planned to send missions for one week each month and to follow up on the guarantee of rights.

• 15-day rotating shifts of public defenders.
• Counseling and free legal assistance for migrants.
• Systematization of information and identification of barriers to the right to education.
• Monitoring of access to education through articulated work and dialogue with relevant educational actors.
• Formulation of recommendations on the educational inclusion of migrant children and adolescents in different institutions.
• Integration into the Education Working Group formed in the city of Pacaraima to discuss and advance in the area of education.

According to article 134 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution, the Public Defender's Office is a permanent institution, essential for the jurisdictional function of the State, which is responsible, as an expression and instrument of the democratic regime, fundamentally for the legal orientation, the promotion of human rights and the defense, at all levels, judicial and extrajudicial, of individual and collective rights, in full and free of charge, to those most in need.

Article 4 of Complementary Law No. 80 of 12 January, 1994, which organizes the Public Defender's Office of the Union, the Federal District and Territories, and prescribes general rules for its organization in the states, establishes the institutional functions of the Public Defender's Office as follows: I - to offer legal guidance and exercise the defense of those in need, at all levels; II - to promote, as a matter of priority, the extrajudicial settlement of disputes, with a view to the settlement of disputes between persons in conflict of interest, through mediation, conciliation, arbitration and other techniques of conflict resolution and administration; III - to promote the dissemination and awareness of human rights, citizenship and the legal system; [...] X - promote the broadest defense of the fundamental rights of the most needy, covering their individual, collective, social, economic, cultural and environmental rights, being admissible all kinds of actions capable of providing their adequate and effective protection; XI - exercise the defense of the individual and collective interests of children and adolescents, the elderly, the person with special needs, the woman victim of domestic violence and other vulnerable social groups that deserve special protection by the State.

DPU programs often consider gender variables. However, training of human rights defenders was not possible for this mission.

Addressing the specific problem of adolescents who were pregnant or with babies generated a legal dilemma for the DPU, since they were adolescents aged 16 or 17 years, with babies and married to older men. Technically, these were unaccompanied adolescents who should be referred for protective measures, but this could lead to a breakdown of the family unit, since the only support network they had was their spouse.

In response to complaints of recruitment of young women for sexual exploitation in the State of Roraima, the DPU carried out actions to prevent the crime of trafficking in persons and developed protection cards with contact numbers for complaints and information for victims.

The cost of the Pacaraima Mission consists of the financing of daily passages and per diems for the defenders sent to Pacaraima. There was no external funding, the resources are internal to the General Secretariat of International Articulation of the DPU, being the project with mission."

Key informant interview conducted on February 26, 2021:

• Key informant 1: João F. C. Chaves – Federal Public Defender - Union Public Defender
• DPU (2019a). Relatório ""Missão Pacaraima – Informativo de atuação: 2º semestre/2018"". Brasília: Secretaria Geral de Articulação Institucional da Defensoria Pública da União, 2019.
• DPU (2019b). Relatório ""Missão Pacaraima – Informativo de atuação: 2º semestre/2018"". Brasília: Secretaria Geral de Articulação Institucional da Defensoria Pública da União, 2019.
• DPU (2020). Relatório ""Missão Pacaraima – Informativo de atuação: 2º semestre/2018"". Brasília: Secretaria Geral de Articulação Institucional da Defensoria Pública da União, 2019.

Reports are available at https://www.dpu.def.br/migracoes-e-refugio

• ROCHA, Lígia Prado da et al. A migrant childhood and adolescence and the challenges of care in the frontier zone. In: SIMÕES, Lucas Diz; MORAIS, Flávia Marcelle Torres Ferreira de; FRANCISQUINI, Diego Escobar. [Orgs]. Public Defender and strategic protection two collectively vulnerable. Belo Horizonte: Editora D’Plácido, 2019, p. 399-428. Available at https://cdnv2.moovin.com.br/livrariadplacido/imagens/files/manuais/_defensoria-publica-e-a-tutela-estrategica-dos-coletivamente-vulnerabilizados.pdf
  

  The article aims to expose the role of the DPU in assisting children and adolescents from other countries (migrants, refugees or stateless persons), separated or unaccompanied, highlighting how care is offered at the border and the main challenges encountered not only in the provision of legal assistance, but to the full protection and supremacy of the best interests of the child.

• For information on the Host Operation: https://www.gov.br/acolhida/

The main objective of the Pacaraima Mission of the DPU is to promote and guarantee the rights of children and young people with migratory difficulties in accordance with the Doctrine of Integral Protection and the best interests of the child. The institution's approach is the implementation of Joint Normative Resolution CONANDA/CONARE/CNIg/DPU No. 1, of August 9, 2017, which establishes preliminary identification, care and protection procedures for unaccompanied or separated children and adolescents.

Between August 2018 and December 2019, the Pacaraima Mission offered legal assistance to approximately 7112 unaccompanied, separated and undocumented children and adolescents for the purposes of implementing the joint resolution, without counting other possibilities of assistance such as guidance or access to rights at the local level (DPU 2019/2020).

The DPU assistance is carried out together with the migration control, in a specific room. Separated or unaccompanied children and adolescents are referred to the DPU for interviews after migration control.

Migration regularization at the border point is aimed at enabling each separated or unaccompanied child or adolescent to follow the journey in a safe and controlled manner.

In the case of Venezuelan migration, this treatment gains even more relevance, considering reports of difficulties in the issuance of identity cards in Venezuela. Venezuelan law stipulates that the identification of children under 9 years of age will be done through the presentation of the birth certificate. The practice, however, demonstrates the difficulty that children up to the age of 12 have in obtaining an identity card due to the economic crisis that also affects State structures and services (ROCHA, 2019, p. 364).

Finally, it is important to highlight that while the sustainability of the Pacaraima Mission would be hampered by the high costs of frequent trips by defenders from all over Brazil and the impossibility of maintaining a fixed team in a context in which the borders are closed, as initially established, the performance of the DPU in the municipality remains fundamental. In this sense, the creation, in 2021, of the Specialized Thematic Committee, with future monthly missions in Pacaraima, to seek paths of positive impact and follow up on what can be done to guarantee rights, was the way in which the DPU managed to make it possible to follow up its work in the municipality. The existence of public defender missions in border regions to guarantee the rights of the population on the move is an initiative of extreme importance and impact, which can be replicated and adapted in other countries.

Good practices of educational inclusion of migrants

Author: UNESCO IIEP Buenos Aires, Oficina para América Latina; Education Cannot Wait; United Nations Children's Fund.

Year of publication: 2021.