Donate now to Care4Calais refugee charity. Support refugees in Calais and the rest of Europe, or find out more about fundraising and volunte
Bit of good news this morning for once.
Care4Calais and other groups launched a legal challenge against channel pushbacks of small boats, claiming lives would be lost because of this policy. The court date was set for May 3rd but the home office have now withdrawn this policy.
This will absolutely save lives.
They are also preparing to challenge the Rwanda policy.
Alongside this, Care4Calais offer a lot of practical aid (food, clothing, shelter, moral support) to refugees in France, Belgium and arriving illegally in the UK.
You can support their work here: https://care4calais.org/donate-now/
As well as volunteering with them in a variety of ways.
Care 4 Calais Brighton aims to raise £6,000.00 for Care4Calais, by taking part in Support Refugees Brighton Hotel from the 28th September 20
There are currently 64 men from Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Iran seeking asylum in the UK who are housed in a hotel in Brighton with NO financial support from the UK government. There is a collection in Brighton this Sunday (3rd October 2021) for badly needed clothing and essentials donations, but please consider donating to this fundraiser to support them if you are not local to Brighton!
#34: The police versus the refugees: Qu’est-ce qu’elles font?
On my very first day of volunteering with Care4Calais, I was trying to understand a contradiction: The French authorities have a cycle of constant evictions of refugee camps in Calais (every 48 hours, all camps are cleared), further installing fences and boulders to discourage settlement. But then La Vie Active rolls up and distributes food, water, and takes the refugees to showers, all paid for by the government. And then they expend huge sums on preventing the refugees from making 34 km crossing into the UK, just beyond the English Channel, but they also seem to do little to deport them. So, what’s going on?
Some basics. Calais became a well-known center for refugee movements around the time of the 2015/16 refugee “crisis”, when the so-called “jungle” reached a refugee population of up to 10,000 people at a given time. The jungle was cleared in 2016 - not for the first time, but this time, things are different. The site is blocked off by tall fences topped with NATO barbed wire and constant police presence. Multiple new sites sprung up, and it is these that are evicted every 48 hours to prevent fixed points.
All this does not prevent refugees from coming to Calais. That’s because they aren’t actually coming here, they are only passing through. According to local sources, and also from my own experience, most of them never wanted to come here at all. How many people have I met that speak fluent German because they spent years in Germany while their applications were being processed? But their asylum got rejected in an EU country and they head out to the UK as their last resort. To get to the UK, they have to pass through Calais.
The UK, however, pays copius amounts of money to France to prevent this exact thing from happening. This year, the deal pays €63 million to France to secure the coastline. The sea is currently the main route for migrants to cross, with security around lorries becoming so tight as to make it virtually impossible for refugees to travel through the tunnel. The waterway too is extremely difficult to manage. Recently, I spoke to an Ethiopian family (two kids and a 8-months pregnant woman) who tried to cross. Everybody was fluent in German, of course. The police caught them, confiscated the boat along with their tents, sleeping bags, clothing, and everything else. Even if the police doesn’t catch them, the smugglers like to overbook their boats. Like another (also Ethiopian) family who got separated, the mother crossing while the father and their two sons had to stay behind. Sometimes the motor breaks down and they just drift back to shore (if their lucky), or have to be rescued. You meet them often, the people who have tried many, many times.
Okay, so money from the UK explains why France would want to stop refugees from coming to Calais, and why they would stop them from crossing. Every now and then, the state plans resettlements or “mise à l’abri” events where the camps get evicted and the refugees get housed around France, away from Calais. They come back though, they always do. You wouldn’t believe the animosity these guys feel against the French authorities - wouldn’t believe it unless you saw the animosity of the police against them.
Then there’s the water - but that’s not the government’s decision at all. In 2017, after the jungle was taken down, local organisations and refugees took the prefecture to court, demanding that drinking water, toilets and showers be provided to the refugees. They won, and after the prefecture + ministry for internal affairs fought the order and took it to the high court, water was provided. Negligence, the court called it, to not provide water. They have a point, you know.
So that’s where we’re at. The financial incentives from the British, the court order by the French high court, and the obdurance and resilience of the refugees.
Sources:
Photo from The Human Rights Observers Project (2019), shows some refugees moving their tents during an eviction with police forces visible in the background.
The Human Rights Observers Project (2019). Forced Evictions in Calais and Grande-Synthe. https://helprefugees.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Forced-Evictions-in-Calais-and-Grande-Synthe-ENG-1.pdf
The Guardian (2021). UK to pay £55m to French border patrols to fund migrant clampdown. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/20/uk-french-border-patrols-migrant-clampdown-priti-patel
BBC (2016). The history of the Calais 'Jungle' camp and how it's changed since 1999. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-37750368
Personal correspondance with local volunteers and refugees (August 2021)
