France ‘clearly changing’ its doctrine on Channel migrant crossings • FRANCE 24 English

France ‘clearly changing’ its doctrine on Channel migrant crossings • FRANCE 24 English

Now, French police have been stepping up efforts to prevent migrants from crossing the English Channel. The government in France is giving law enforcement a freer hand after police were filmed slashing the rubber of boats carrying migrants. For more on the story, we can bring in our French politics editor Mark Pman. Uh Mark, good to see you. Has France changed its doctrine when it comes to to what it can and cannot do? It is clearly uh changing as those images uh show because up until now uh the uh police authorities could only intervene if a boat was in dire straits to rescue it. Uh now there’s a new proposal being discussed uh that the the authorities could intervene up to 300 meters off uh the coast. uh whether or not there is a risk uh to the people on that boat. And so this is why uh you’ve seen the images of policemen puncturing rubber boats and preventing them from leaving the coast. Why is that? Uh because uh there’s been an influx of people trying to leave and also it’s more scattered departure along the coast in smaller boats called now taxi boats. And uh this is why the French authorities are now discussing in coordination uh with the British authorities how to make sure they are much more efficient. But obviously this is a much more difficult task because it means intervening more intervening in more dangerous position. The police is not necessarily trained to intervene at sea and we know from NOS’s from observers uh that most of the casualties happen when uh the migrants uh are getting on the boats in a hurry often in the dark and this is where most accidents most droning take place. Uh so this is a change that is being discussed obviously not in a vacuum because there’s political pressure, financial pressure from the UK and also because the French president is about to begin a state visit to the United Kingdom as of tomorrow. So why are we seeing this this pressure from the United Kingdom now? Well uh because obviously this is a major political issue. Uh remember the previous government had campaigned on stopping the boats. uh the the current government Kirst Starmer said we will uh fight uh this as well. We need to really get tough on this. We want to see uh results and uh the statistics are showing that more than 20,000 people have crossed in the first 6 months. It’s uh 50% increase from the same period last year and this could mean that this year could be a record year. They’re not necessarily more boats, but they’re more more people because, as I said before, they’re using smaller uh boats and there is political pressure. Why? Because in the UK, the government is very unpopular. We’re seeing the UK reform party rising in the polls. Why are they rising? Because they’re using this issue of immigration. the fact uh that the flow cannot be stopped by Britain and by France as political fuel to push uh their their campaign and so this is why there’s a lot of pressure also here in France the law and order interior minister Brunoayo met his with his British counterpart several months ago he said we need to do much more why do they need to do more because it’s a little bit like Turkey and the EU which reached an agreement several years ago whereby the EU was paying Turkey to prevent migrants from reaching the EU, the the United Kingdom is paying France and more and more to prevent migrants from coming and so uh on the other side of the channel uh the authorities, political police and so on are asking well what’s being done with our money is it working or not for now it seems not to be working but obviously this raises the uh the issue the humanitarian issue What should be done with those migrants? Will this mean they will take even more risk and this would mean more and more death trying to cross the channel? This is going to remain a major major humanitarian, political and security issues in the months to come. Yeah.

The BBC on Friday broadcast footage of French police puncturing a boat with a knife as it was about to set off for the UK, with dozens of migrants then making their way back to shore. The act shows French authorities are “clearly changing” their doctrine when it comes to preventing migrant crossings, says FRANCE 24’s Marc Perelman.
#France #migrants #Channel

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