Around sixty activists and migrants gathered this Wednesday, September 4, in a park in Calais to pay tribute to the 12 victims of the shipwreck in the Channel that occurred the day before.
A tribute was paid on Wednesday in Calais to the 12 people who died the day before while trying to reach Great Britain illegally, while the French authorities point the finger at London’s immigration policy.
Ten women and two men died after their boat carrying more than 60 passengers, including Eritreans, broke apart off Cape Gris-Nez on Tuesday.
A gathering of around sixty people
Around sixty activists and migrants gathered in a park in Calais on Wednesday evening to pay tribute to the victims. They unfurled a huge banner listing the hundreds of deaths that have occurred on the border between France and the United Kingdom since the end of the 1990s.
“I was holding my sister’s hand when it happened and I tried to find something to hold on to (…) but the waves pushed me away from her,” said a young Eritrean man, whose 18-year-old sister died, with misty eyes and a candle in his hand.
The death toll from the shipwreck remained stable at 12, the prefect of Pas-de-Calais said. Two people remain hospitalized, according to Lille prosecutor Carole Etienne. The bodies of the deceased were transported to the Lille forensic institute for identification.
Boat almost sunk when rescuers arrived
“When we arrived, there was no longer any boat, it had practically sunk,” said Axel Baheu, 25, skipper of the Murex trammel boat in Boulogne-sur-Mer, who was called to the rescue by the Regional Operations and Rescue Centre (CROSS).
As a rescue ship picked up survivors, “we picked up life jackets, whatever debris there was, backpacks, personal belongings, and we ended up coming across bodies,” he said.
On Wednesday, the resigning Secretary of State for the Sea, Hervé Berville, went to Boulogne, from where he expressed “the nation’s full solidarity” with the victims and assured that “robust” rescue resources had been “mobilised in record time”.
“We are subjected to this hypocrisy”
After Gérald Darmanin, the resigned Minister of the Interior, who on Tuesday called for a migration treaty between Great Britain and the European Union to curb illegal departures, the LR mayor of Calais called on Wednesday for a showdown with London.
“We are subjected to this hypocrisy,” lamented Natacha Bouchart, referring to labour legislation in England and the existence of numerous British people smugglers.
“At some point we will have to have a showdown with this government” to avoid “that in fifty years we (are) still at the same level, with people who want to go to England because it continues to be an Eldorado”, she insisted.
The prefect and Ms Bouchart were speaking at a press conference presenting the work to secure a logistics platform upstream of the port of Calais and the Channel Tunnel, in order to prevent migrants from entering trucks.
Barriers to prevent intrusions
Nearly 11 km of additional barriers will be installed in this already largely locked-down area, at a cost of 4.5 million euros, financed by Great Britain, indicated Ms Bouchart.
Since the port and the tunnel were secured, attempted intrusions “have almost disappeared”, stressed Prefect Billant, indicating that they have gone from “more than 15,000 in 2016 to 127 in 2023”.
But hundreds of migrants continue to try to board trucks upstream each year: 3,142 were discovered in 2023 and 2,646 since the beginning of 2024, according to the same source.
Record number of crossings
And those seeking exile have turned to the Channel, with a record number of illegal crossings in the first six months of 2024, according to the British authorities, who on Tuesday counted the arrival by this means of 21,615 migrants since January.
Tuesday’s shipwreck, after a series of others during the summer, makes 2024 the deadliest year in the Channel since the phenomenon of illegal crossings took off in 2018.
The director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), Didier Leschi, indicated on France Info that the victims of this shipwreck would be offered the opportunity to “file an asylum application in France but it is not certain that they will accept”.
Human rights defender Claire Hédon called for “a profound reorientation of national and European asylum and immigration policies”.
