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CALAIS

Migrants step up efforts to cross Channel Tunnel

Migrants in Calais made around 1,700 attempts overnight to penetrate the Channel Tunnel premises in a bid to get to England, French police sources said on Monday, and an officer sustained facial injuries from a stone.

Published: 3 August 2015 11:10 CEST
Migrants step up efforts to cross Channel Tunnel
Migrants in Calais are becoming ever-more desperate to cross the Channel to the UK. Photo: AFP
Of the 1,700 attempts, some 1,000 were “pushed back” by authorities and 700 were intercepted within the 650-hectare Channel Tunnel site, police added.
   
The officer was hit in the face by a stone apparently thrown by a Sudanese migrant, who was arrested. The policeman was taken to hospital for stitches.
   
The 1,700 attempts represented a major increase from the last few nights when only a few hundred were registered.
   
The chaos at Calais spiked last week when more than 2,000 attempts were made to breach the Eurotunnel defences and one person was killed, a Sudanese man in his 30s who was apparently crushed by a lorry.
   
At least 10 people have died since June in the rush to sneak into England, seen by migrants as an “Eldorado”.
   
French police have bolstered their presence with 120 additional officers, which appears to be reducing the number of nightly attempts to storm the Eurotunnel premises.
   
The issue has become a cross-Channel political hot potato, with British Prime Minister David Cameron coming under fire for comments in which he referred to “swarms” of people seeking to get into the country.
   
Anger is also mounting in France over the issue.
   
Henri Guaino, a lawmaker from the opposition right-wing party Les Republicains, called on London to “do their share.”
   
“There is no reason for these people to be stored — if I may say this because it's almost that — in France. It cannot go on like this,” said Guaino.
   
“The situation is fairly simple. Migrants come to Calais to get to England. England does not want them. Therefore the migrants pile up in Calais and try by whatever means they can to reach England.”
   
Earlier this week, the British government pledged 10 million euros ($11 million) to improve fencing around the Eurotunnel rail terminal in Coquelles, outside Calais.
   
And Cameron, who has warned that the crisis could last all summer, promised “more fencing, more resources, more sniffer dog teams” to aid French police in their nightly cat-and-mouse game with the migrants.

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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