Five migrants died on Sunday morning as people smuggling across the English channel resumed following a 27-day pause.
France’s Maritime Prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea said on Sunday morning that five people had died near Wimereux beach, one person was in critical condition, with one more in a less critical condition, and 32 people were supported by the emergency system on land.
The prefecture said a boat was reported to be in difficulty at around 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, and that “semi-rigid” boats and a helicopter picked up six “inanimate” people—including five dead and one unconscious—and one other person who was in severe hypothermia.
The authorities are also searching to see if there are others adrift.
The tragedy came just one day after people-smuggling boats resumed shipping migrants from France to the UK.
According to the Home Office’s preliminary figure, a total of 124 illegal immigrants were detected on Saturday in three boats. It was the first day of channel crossing this year after a 27-day pause, the longest gap since channel crossing became more frequent in late 2018. The second longest gap was 25 days between Feb. 8 and March 3 in 2020.
On Saturday, France’s Maritime Prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea also said a boat was reported to be in difficulty off the coast of Wimereux in the morning. French rescuers picked up two people on board and let the rest continue their journey after they “refused the assistance offered.”
Rwanda Bill
The incident came as the UK is debating over the government’s Rwanda bill, which is aimed at clearing the legal hurdle that prevented illegal immigrants from being removed to Rwanda and thereby deter migrants from taking the journey from safe countries such as France.Speaking to BBC’s “Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg” programme, Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron said the deaths on Sunday are heartbreaking, and argued they show “we’ve got to stop the boats.”
“You can only think about what an appalling end it would be, and the cold waters of the Channel in the middle of the night. It breaks my heart to hear about it,” he said.
“But it just shows we’ve got to stop the boats, we’ve got to stop this illegal trade in human beings.”
Lord Cameron argued that the solution is forcibly removing unauthorised arrivals to Rwanda, with the government’s bill returning to the Commons for crunch votes this week.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer described the incident as a “tragic loss of life” but rejected deportation as a solution.
“I absolutely agree that we need to stop these Channel crossings,” he told the same programme.
“They are dangerous, we have lost control of our borders, and we need to do something to stop the boats.
“Now, I think the starting place for that is to go after the criminal gangs that are running this vile trade.”
The government’s Rwanda bill is opposed from both the left and the right, with Labour calling the whole deportation plan “gimmicks” that won’t work and traditionalist Tories saying the bill is not tough enough to plug legal loopholes.
The bill passed a second reading last month, with the abstention of Tory rebels, but they may yet defeat the bill if the government doesn’t accept their amendments.
Writing in the same publication on the following day, Mark Francois, chair of the European Research Group; Sir John Hayes, chair of the Common Sense Group; and Danny Kruger, co-chair of the New Conservatives group, said almost 60 MPs have signed their amendments.
The MPs said their two main concerns are that the bill doesn’t make it the default position for ministers to ignore injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights and that the delay of removal in lengthy court battles “risks frustrating the entire purpose of the legislation.”
