BRUSSELS, Belgium--The European Commission is urging more of its member countries to launch the EU hot line to report missing children.
The EU’s executive office last year earmarked one phone number _ 116 000 _ for the line in all 27 EU countries, but so far only Greece and Hungary have set it up and seven other nations are in the process of doing so.
Commission Vice President Jacques Barrot said Monday that he would put pressure on EU justice and home affairs ministers to implement the number and set up the cross-border system to monitor child disappearances.
“The first hours are very often crucial, and it is because of the trans-border nature of such cases that there is a need for a single European number,” said Sir Francis Jacob, chairman of Missing Children Europe, a Brussels-based federation for missing and sexually exploited children.
The caller would first reach a national organization dealing with missing children, which would then launch a European alert, he said.
Thousands of children disappear in the EU every year.
In Belgium alone, 3,600 children went missing in 2006, including runaways, abductions and cases of sexual abuse. In France, 45,000 cases of child disappearances were registered in the same year, according to Missing Children Europe.
The parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann have supported calls for the cross-border alert system for missing children.
Madeleine disappeared from a Portuguese resort in May 2007 just before her fourth birthday, and her case has attracted international media attention.