EVEN in the most idyllic of places it’s often hard to escape the harsh realities of the world in which we live. Hiking along the Andalusian coast while on holiday recently, I would sometimes come across the remains of large rubber rafts, lying semi-submerged among the rocks and sand of an otherwise deserted cove. Just a few miles away across the Strait of Gibraltar sits the continent of Africa. It is so close that come nightfall, it’s possible to see the harbour lights in the Moroccan port city of Tangier.

The Strait is a dangerous stretch of water, but this hasn’t stopped many refugees from sub-Saharan Africa trying to make the crossing in the rafts that I found washed up on the Spanish shoreline.

These encounters would momentarily take me back to beaches on the Greek island of Kos. There, too, just a few years ago while covering the mass exodus of refugees attempting to reach Europe, I came across the detritus of these perilous journeys made by the displaced and desperate.

I’ll never forget the sight of endless heaps of orange “life jackets” abandoned on Kos’s beaches.

Many of the life jackets were fake, lined with nothing more than bubble wrap and sold by unscrupulous smugglers and people traffickers to unsuspecting families, many of whom unsurprisingly drowned during the crossing from Turkey.

I recall one night waiting on a beach for the latest arrivals of what had become near daily crossings. We had placed our car so that its headlights shone out from the shoreline into the water.

Through the night-time blackness we could pick out the pale, ghostly outline of a large upturned inflatable boat drifting on the waves of the Aegean. There was no sound, no voices save those of the small group of volunteers who had gathered on the beach with their flashlights trained on the water. One pointed to a small bundle floating on the current no more than 50 yards out.

“It looks like the body of a child, a baby,” someone said, their voice along with the hiss of waves lapping on to the shingle of the beach breaking the solemn silence. Sadly this was nothing unusual. More than once during that assignment the bodies of children and stories of those alive who had made the crossing would emerge. Many of these youngsters who had made it to Europe had already survived the horrors of war in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, too, had made the journey alone or with siblings. This was not something their parents wanted.

Often mums and dads were faced with the most awful dilemma of choosing to send their children on the most dangerous of journeys in the hope of safety in a foreign country or having them continue to live in the shadow of war.

Just ask yourself, what would you do? What choice would you make were the safety and well being of your children under imminent threat from barrel bombs or the brutality of Islamic State (IS) jihadists in cities like Aleppo or Mosul?

Hundreds of these child refugees were granted the right to come to the UK, but some still find themselves stuck in the often-terrifying limbo of camps in the Greek islands and elsewhere.

Their plight surfaced – albeit almost unnoticed – this week as it emerged that fewer than half of the 480 unaccompanied child refugees whom the Government pledged to house in the UK under the Dubs Amendment have actually arrived.

In some cases children already granted the right to come have been waiting more than a year to transfer from Greece to the UK.

Why is the Government dragging its heels on this? In response, of course, it says that it prefers to take unaccompanied refugee children directly from the affected regions of Syria and Iraq.

But the fact remains that under the Dubs Amendment some children already in Europe were given the right to come to the UK. Any continuing delay in bringing them here only leaves them vulnerable, often at the mercy of traffickers and sexual exploitation.

This vulnerability is even more apparent in the case of those in Europe who have already fallen through the system.

According to Oxfam, 28 children every single day are going missing in Italy alone, while numerous other charities and human rights groups cite reports of sexual assaults in official European refugee camps. Indeed, some camps are said to be so unsafe that youngsters are too terrified to leave their tents at night.

Given this terrible state of affairs, why then despite the Dubs Amendment and agreed transfer rights of some children to the UK should they continue to languish in such camps? There is simply no justifiable excuse for the UK Government’s lethargy on this issue, unless of course it’s hoping the plight of child refugees will simply drop of the radar.

Concern over the UK’s Dubs obligation aside, the European refugee crisis continues to be one of the biggest moral tests and political stalemates of our generation.

Remember when those harrowing pictures of the flimsy rafts and their terrified occupants appeared almost nightly on our television screens? Well, where are those pictures now?

While the mass crossings from Turkey might have stopped, the movement of those coming across the Mediterranean from Libya, mainly refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, continues daily and takes a terrible toll. Already deaths on this longer and more treacherous Central Mediterranean route have passed the 2,300 mark, with next to nothing in the way of news coverage.

As humanitarian group Save the Children has highlighted, this too, is increasingly a children’s issue. The number of children taking this route rose 76 per cent in 2016, while the numbers of children travelling alone more than doubled.

Staggeringly. almost 93 per cent of child refugees currently being rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean are alone. Most are from sub-Saharan Africa, which perhaps only makes it easier for some to cynically ignore their plight.

For too long now the Aegean and Mediterranean have been the mass unmarked graves of refugee children. At the very least the UK Government should honour the pledge it made under the Dubs Amendment. It must ensure that without further delay those children who made it ashore in Europe are given the safety and sanctuary they were promised.