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CRISIS

Extra French police help curb Calais migrant flow

A newly enforced police unit in northern France blocked at least 200 people from reaching the Channel Tunnel on Thursday night, as the British government prepares for an emergency meeting on Friday to grapple with the crisis.

Published: 31 July 2015 08:18 CEST
Extra French police help curb Calais migrant flow
French gendarmes attempt to block a migrant after he entered the Eurotunnel site. Photo: AFP
An AFP journalist saw waves of people descend onto the railways on foot close to the Eurotunnel site around 9 pm (1900 GMT) on Thursday, only to be halted by police.
   
At least a dozen more made it past the cordon, but ran straight into a second line of officers waiting a hundred metres (330 feet) further down the line.
   
Around 3,000 people from countries including Syria and Eritrea are camping out in the northern French port of Calais and trying to cross into Britain illegally by clambering on board lorries and trains.
   
France has bolstered its police presence in Calais and migrants have made fewer attempts to enter the Eurotunnel than in previous nights.
   
Traffic through the tunnel, which had been severely disrupted the previous day, was barely affected.
   
Britain's prime minister, meanwhile, has come under fire for controversial comments on the crisis, which dominated British media this week as holidaymakers and truck drivers have been blocked on the British side due to delays caused by the migrants' actions.
   
David Cameron referred to a “swarm of people” wanting to come to his country to seek better lives and find employment, speaking while on a visit to Vietnam.
   
Cameron will chair a meeting of his government's COBRA emergency committee on Friday on the issue, and London has also pledged £7 million (€10 million, $11 million) to improve fencing around the Eurotunnel rail terminal at Coquelles, northern France.
   
Britain's Ministry of Defence is also considering freeing up some of its land to become temporary lorry parks to help reduce long queues on the motorway in Kent, southern England, due to delays, according to British newspapers The Times and The Daily Telegraph.
   
The crisis in Calais has spiked in intensity in the past few days, with upwards of 2,000 desperate bids nightly to sneak into the tunnel.
   
One man died early Wednesday, apparently crushed by a lorry as he tried to make it into the tunnel.
   
Another migrant, who had suffered head injuries at the weekend, died earlier in the week, authorities announced on Thursday, bringing to 10 the
total number of deaths since June.
   
A teenage Egyptian boy was also fighting for his life after being electrocuted after jumping onto the roof of a Eurostar train bound for London at Paris's central Gare du Nord station, a police source said.
 
'Send in the army'
 
France's interior minister sent 120 additional police officers to the scene on a temporary basis, but the migrant crisis is sowing chaos with truckers carrying freight across the tunnel, with tailbacks sometimes as long as 65 kilometres (40 miles) on the British side.
   
The crisis has unsurprisingly become a hot political issue on both sides of the Channel.
   
Cameron's comments earned him criticism from acting opposition Labour Party leader Harriet Harman, who said Cameron should “remember he is talking about people, not insects”.
   
The Refugee Council, a leading British charity which works with asylum seekers, said it was “awful, dehumanising language from a world leader”.
 

POLICE

French police cause misery for migrants in Calais

French police are inflicting misery on migrants in the northern port of Calais, routinely tearing down their tents and forcing them to wander the streets as part of a deterrence policy, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report published on Thursday.

Published: 7 October 2021 12:30 CEST
French police cause misery for migrants in Calais
A migrant camp is evacuated by police forces in Calais in February 2019. Photo: Philippe HUGUEN / AFP.

The 75-page report documents methods used by authorities to prevent the emergence of another major migrant settlement in Calais, five years after the demolition of the sprawling “Jungle” camp which housed up to 10,000 people at its peak.

Calais has for years been a rallying point for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa trying to sneak across the English Channel to Britain.

Faced with growing public anti-migrant sentiment, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has waged a campaign to prevent new camps emerging.

Police tactics include systematically tearing down migrants’ tents in the woods, on wasteland or under bridges, regularly confiscating their belongings and harassing NGOs trying to provide them with aid, according to New York-based HRW.

“The authorities carry out these abusive practices with the primary purposes of forcing people to move elsewhere, without resolving their
migration status or lack of housing, or of deterring new arrivals,” it said in the report entitled “Enforced Misery: The Degrading Treatment of Migrant Children and Adults in Northern France”.

‘Harass and abuse’

NGOs estimate the number of migrants currently living around Calais at between 1,500 and 2,000, including numerous families. Local authorities estimate that only 500 remain in the area.

Last week, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered the eviction of a camp housing 400 migrants near a hospital in Calais, which was presented as a danger to the hospital’s patients and staff.

On that occasion the migrants were taken to temporary shelters but often they are left to wander the streets.

“When the police arrive, we have five minutes to get out of the tent before they destroy everything,” a Kurdish woman from Iraq told HRW.

The interior ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on the report.

The government argues that the camps are havens for people smugglers, who command extortionate fees to help migrants cross to Britain, either in a small boat crossing the Channel in the dead of night or stowed away on a truck crossing by ferry or through the Channel Tunnel.

NGOs argue that the tactics do nothing more than make migrants already difficult lives even more miserable.

The report quoted the Calais-based Human Rights Observers group as saying that in some cases cleaning crews cut migrants’ tents while people are still inside, in order to force them out.

“If the aim is to discourage migrants from gathering in northern France, these policies are a manifest failure and result in serious harm,” Benedicte Jeannerod, France director at Human Rights Watch, said.

French authorities “need a new approach to help people, not repeatedly harass and abuse them,” she added.

A total of 15,400 people attempted to cross the Channel in the first eight months of this year, a increase of 50 percent over the figure for the whole of 2020, according to French coast guard statistics.

“Exiles aren’t travelling to northern France because they’ve heard they can camp in the woods or stay under a bridge…They come because that’s where the border is,” Charlotte Kwantes, national coordinator of the Utopia 56 charity was quoted in the report as saying.

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