The French government on Friday announced an “action plan” to counter attempts by migrants to cross the Channel to Britain by sea, which it has promised would end a phenomenon that has alarmed the Conversative government in London.
An increase in crossings by asylum seekers, mostly Iranians, has led UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid to declare a “major incident,” with the government under pressure to provide a response.
“This plan should enable us to end these crossings,” French Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner was quoted as saying in a statement on Friday, adding that they were “not only illegal, but also extremely dangerous.”
“It’s in our interest, as well as the United Kingdom’s, to do everything to prevent new networks [of people smugglers] developing, which would likely attract irregular migrants to our shores again,” it added.
The plan would see stepped-up police patrols around ports where some migrants have attempted to steal boats, as well as surveillance of beaches where dinghies have been launched from.
A Royal Navy ship was patrolling the Channel on Friday in addition to four other British coast guard boats that watch over the 33km of sea that separate France and Britain at its narrowest point.
France has doubled the number of coast guard boats in the Channel to two to four per night depending on the weather, a spokeswoman for French marine operations in the area told reporters.
The new French measures would be in addition to a joint action plan announced on Monday by the French and British governments, according to the statement from the interior ministry.
Castaner is to travel to London soon to discuss the joint plan, which is expected to include combined operations at sea and greater intelligence sharing about smuggler networks.
Earlier on Friday, French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux had downplayed the phenomenon of sea crossings in the Channel by comparing the number of arrivals in Britain with the number of people crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
“We are not talking about the same level at all,” Griveaux said.
A total of 504 people, the vast majority in the past two months, attempted to cross the Channel to Britain last year, with 276 successful in reaching British waters, according to the latest figures from the interior ministry.
Data from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees showed that 55,756 people crossed the Mediterranean to Spain last year.
“There is no requirement to increase any further the resources there [on the Channel coast] which are working very well and are proving their worth,” Griveaux said.
Explanations for the sudden spurt in sea crossings vary.
The weather in the past few months has been unusually calm, security officials have said.
However, Fabien Sudry, the top security official in the northern Pas-de-Calais region, told reporters that the most likely reason is the arrival over the past month of larger-than-usual numbers of Iranians around the port of Calais.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion