To try to limit the perilous crossings of the Channel in “Small Boats”, London is committed to paying in Paris 72.2 million euros for the period 2022-2023 in order to buy drones and finance the Deployment of 40 % police and gendarmes on the hexagonal beaches.
by Julia Pascual and Cécile Ducourtieux (London, correspondent)
More money, equipment and police and customs cooperation: the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, and his British counterpart, Suella Braverman, welcomed the signing of an agreement on Monday, November 14 Franco-British aimed at limiting the perilous crossings of the sleeve in pneumatic boats. London is committed to paying 72.2 million euros to Paris for the period 2022-2023. What buy new drones and finance the deployment of “40 %” of additional police and gendarmes on the hexagonal beaches, said the home office. However, no one imagines that this agreement – which extends that of Sandhurst signed in 2018 between Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron and is part of the 2003 Touquet Treaty – will resolve the Small Boats crisis. More than 41,000 migrants have landed in south-eastern England since the beginning of the year, twice as in 2021 at the same time.
This agreement comes a year after the sinking of a boat in the English Channel, during which at least 27 people died drowned. Elements of the current judicial investigation, revealed on Sunday by Le Monde on this drama (the most important occurrence since the start of crossings in Small Boats), show major dysfunctions in the organization of rescue at sea, against the backdrop of lack of rescue means. This aspect is completely absent from the Franco-British agreement, which focuses on the fight against organized crime and the strengthening of technical means to “make the road to non-viable makeshift boats”, underline the two countries in their joint declaration .
“Nearly twenty years after the Treaty Treaty, there is still an exclusively police co-management solution”, regrets Olivier Cahn, member of the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Institutions (CESDIP) and author of a thesis on Franco-British police cooperation in the transmanche border area. If the joint declaration is pleased with the “deployment, for the first time, of teams of observers embedded in our two countries”, in reality, underlines Mr. Cahn, “from the early 2000s, police officers or agents of the ‘British immigration came to France. We will see them for the first time on the beaches, the French will be able to say that the English are fully associated and therefore they will no longer be accused of not doing the work. “
You have 50.48% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.