A Dutch Christian Democrat MEP has called for better registration of child refugees following claims that thousands may have ended up in the European sex industry, the AD says on Friday.

Jeroen Lenaers said during a debate in the European parliament on Thursday that all children under the age of 14 should be registered and more needs to be done to ensure they are safe.

Without registration and a system for reporting that children had disappeared, ‘the chance of finding them shrinks by the second’, Lenaers said.

D66 MEP Judith Sargentini raised the alarm last week about teenage refugee girls in Greece who were sleeping in camps with adult men and no supervision.

Missing

According to Europol, a large number of the 10,000 missing refugee children have been taken by organised criminals for the sex industry.

In February, lobby group Defence for Children urged the Netherlands to do more to track down missing refugee children and take steps to make sure they do not disappear.

The last available figures date from 2014 and show 110 refugee children disappeared while living in a centre. Some have moved to another country but at least 10 children have vanished from protected care facilities, broadcaster Nos said at the time.

‘These children are within our borders,’ Defence for Children’s Martine Goeman told Nos. ‘So it is our responsibility to take the problem seriously.’