19-Year-Old Charged in Connection With English Channel Boat Deaths

Members of the Dover lifeboat place a body bag on a stretcher after returning to the Port of Dover following a large search and rescue operation launched in the English Channel off the coast of Dungeness, in Kent, southeast England, on Dec. 14, 2022. (Gareth Fuller/PA Media)

A 19-year-old man has been charged with facilitating illegal entry into the UK in connection with the sinking of an inflatable boat in the English channel during which four people drowned.

Kent police announced on Sunday that as part of an investigation into the incident, Ibrahima Bah, of no fixed address had been charged with“knowingly facilitating the attempted arrival in the United Kingdom of people he knew or had reasonable cause to believe were asylum seekers.”

Police say that they are still working to establish the identity of those who died in the early hours of Dec. 11 as they attempted to cross the 20-mile-wide English channel in the dark during the first cold snap of winter.

The police and coastguard carried out a rescue operation, and 39 people were brought to safety on the shore.

The drownings last week sharpened already intense debate over how the government should tackle the growing number of people attempting the illegal crossing, which has been steadily shooting up from just 299 in 2018, to over 44,000 this year.

In the House of Commons, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “sorrow” at the incident.

Just one day earlier Sunak had laid out his plan to tackle issues around illegal immigration, including a pledge to abolish a backlog of asylum applications.

Sunak’s Plans

Presenting a packed five-point plan to Parliament, Sunak said he would set up a dedicated team to crack down on people smuggling using small boats and working illegally in the UK; house asylum seekers in cheaper accommodation; revamp the asylum application process to ramp up productivity; and speed up the deportation of failed applicants.

The policy announcement came as almost 150,000 asylum applications are waiting for decisions, with almost two-thirds having waited for more than six months.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks on during the annual Lord Mayor's Banquet at Guildhall, in London, Britain, on Nov. 28, 2022. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, hailed the announcement as a “welcome, if belated” proposal to solve the problem, but told The Epoch Times the prime minister and his party will be judged “on results.”

But Peter William Walsh, senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said that Sunak’s announcement may be interpreted as “tough rhetoric” rather than a real change in policies. He said that if read at face value, the stated plan to kick out all illegal arrivals could involve the UK neglecting its international obligations on asylum claims.

Sunak announced a “permanent” and “unified” Small Boats Operational Command, which he said will consolidate the military and civilian capabilities to take a coordinated approach to policing the English Channel.

Sunak also referenced an agreement made specifically with Albania.

Albanians comprised 12,000 of the 38,000 people who had made the illegal channel crossing this year, the Home Office’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander told MPs in November, adding that 10,000 of those were adult men.

Sunak’s plans mean most claims from Albanians can “simply be declared ‘clearly unfounded,'” Sunak said, before unveiling a new deal with the Balkan country which contributed a third of all small-boat arrivals this year.

Citing Albania’s credential as “an EU accession country, a NATO ally and a member of the same treaty against trafficking as the United Kingdom,” Sunak argued the UK should deny the claims of the majority of Albanians making their way illegally to UK shores.

Almost 55 percent of Albanian claims had been approved by the Home Office to June 2022.

Crossing Deaths

The Conservative government has argued that stemming the flow of people making the dangerous crossing of the English channel—one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world–from France is partly about saving lives.

Precise figures on the number of deaths during the attempted crossings are unknown, with incidents involving a handful of deaths typically officially announced by French or British authorities every few months during the last few years.

Last autumn, French authorities reported that 27 people drowned off the French coast as they attempted the crossing in bad weather.

According to the UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration (IOM), 210 people have drowned in the English channel since 2014.

Channel crossings make up a growing proportion of illegal immigration to the UK. However, the majority of illegal immigrants in the UK are those who have overstayed visas, failed to receive asylum, or have obtained visas illegally.

Illegal immigrants, whose small boat was intercepted in the English Channel, are escorted ashore from a Border Force vessel in Dover, Kent, on Aug. 23, 2022. (PA)

There is little precise information on levels of what might be categorized as illegal immigration into the UK, not least because the definition of “illegal” immigration is also hard to pin down and is subject to different interpretations and uses.

A report by the London School of Economics in 2007 (pdf) estimated the number of “irregular” migrants was 533,000—a little under one percent of the population.

PA Media and Lily Zhou contributed to this report