France and Britain share blame after 27 people die in migrant tragedy

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France and Britain exchanged blame Thursday after the death of 27 people trying to cross the Channel in a rubber dinghy, the worst accident of its kind ever recorded in the waterway separating the two countries. With relations sown by years of tension over Brexit and immigration, the focus has been on who should take responsibility, even as both sides are committed to working together to find common solutions.

“There is mismanagement of immigration (in Britain),” French Home Secretary Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio, while calling on other European countries, which migrants cross to join the French coasts and then Great Britain, to do more to help them. “It’s an international problem,” Darmanin said. We say to our Belgian, German and British friends that they should help us fight the traffickers who work internationally.

Her British counterpart Priti Patel said she would have talks with Darmanin, hours after Prime Minister Boris Johnson blamed France, saying: “We have struggled to persuade some of our partners, especially the French, to do things in a way that we think the situation deserves. “Meanwhile, rescue volunteers and advocacy groups have said catastrophic drowning is to be expected as the smugglers and migrants take more risks to avoid a growing police presence.

“To accuse only the smugglers is to hide the responsibility of the French and British authorities”, declared the NGO Auberge de Migrants. She and other NGOs stressed the absence of legal migration routes and the strengthening of security on the Eurotunnel submarine rail link, which prompted migrants to attempt the perilous sea crossing.

The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where the currents are strong, the water is cold and the canoes are often overloaded. “It is a tragedy that we feared, which was expected, we had sounded the alarm,” said Bernard Barron, head of the SNSM region of Calais, a group of volunteers who help people at sea.

“The smugglers are more and more reckless, criminals, throwing into the sea poor innocent people who want at all costs to reach England without knowing the sea.” SECURITY French Prime Minister Jean Castex was due to hold a crisis meeting Thursday morning, as authorities announced that a total of five suspected smugglers had been arrested in connection with the disaster.

Britain has renewed its offer to have joint Franco-British patrols off the French coast near Calais, from where Britain can be seen on a clear day and where most migrants take to the water. Paris has already resisted such calls and it is not known whether it will change its mind five months before a presidential election in which migration and security are key topics. London has in the past threatened to cut financial support for the French border police if they failed to stem the flow.

“We are ready to offer support on the ground, we are ready to offer resources,” UK Immigration Minister Kevin Foster told BBC TV. “We are ready to offer, literally, people to go out there and help and assist the French authorities.” “We are clear: we do not see this only as a problem which France must face, but a problem which we want to work with France and our European partners in the broad sense … to break the economic model of these gangs,”, Foster said.

The resumption of UK border control was a totem pole for Brexit campaigners ahead of the 2016 referendum on EU membership. Reuters saw a group of migrants emerge from the sand dunes near Calais before crowding into a rubber dinghy. They were seen landing hours later in Dungeness, southern England.

Ahead of Wednesday’s disaster, 14 people had drowned this year trying to get to Britain, an official with the local maritime prefecture said. In 2020, seven people died and two were missing, while in 2019, four died. (Written by Richard Lough and Ingrid Melander; edited by Mike Collett-White and Giles Elgood)

(This story was not edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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