Channel shipwreck: six children and a pregnant woman among the dead

Brussels – There were at least six children and a pregnant woman among the 12 migrants who died while attempting to cross the English Channel aboard an overflowing makeshift boat. This was announced by French authorities, who are conducting the investigation. The governments of the two countries are bouncing responsibility for the incident as they increase controls at their borders.

The shipwreck occurred on Tuesday (September 3) and involved a boat carrying at least sixty people, far more than it could have accommodated. Rescuers managed to bring 51 of them to safety (two of whom were reportedly in critical condition), but for at least 12, there was nothing to be done. According to initial reports, just eight of the boat’s guests wore life jackets. Among the victims, who, according to the authorities in Boulogne-sur-Mer (a French resort near Le Portel, off whose coast the tragedy occurred), reportedly were mostly female, there was also one pregnant woman and six unaccompanied minors. It appears that most of the deceased were of Eritrean origin, but it is still too early for their nationalities to be accurately identified.

The Executive Director of Frontex (the EU agency for monitoring the bloc’s external borders), Hans Leijtens, was in a hearing this morning (September 4) at the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE). Asked by MEPs about the incident, he commented by pointing out that “it is the traffickers and migrants who decide” to embark and cross the sea – be it the Mediterranean or the English Channel. “We can only try to spot them, figure out how they are sailing and raise the alarm” to national authorities, he added: “Obviously, if we have manpower on the ground, we deploy them to save lives (of the shipwrecked, NDR), but in most cases, our role is to identify the boats and alert the authorities.”

The “crisis of the barges” that cross the Channel from the Continent to Britain has become an increasingly divisive issue between Paris and London, who exchange accusations as people continue to die in the tiny arm of the sea separating the two countries. The French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin declared right from Boulogne-sur-Mer that the UK “pays a fraction” of what is spent by the transalpine government to prevent tragedies like this one, calling for a specific treaty on migration between the EU and its former member state. Since security measures have been tightened in France (thanks in part to the 476 million pounds check over three years written by Her Majesty’s government last year), departures are taking place from increasingly dangerous places and in boats that are almost always unsuitable for the crossing.

On the other side of the Channel, British Secretary of State Yvette Cooper called the incident “a horrific and deeply tragic incident,” stressed the need to dismantle the criminal networks of traffickers who put desperate people at sea in dilapidated boats and even in adverse weather conditions. But Keir Starmer’s new Labour government—which also trashed its predecessors’ infamous plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda— does not seem intent on adopting much softer policies toward those who risk their lives to reach British shores. With the approximately 300 million pounds earmarked by the Conservatives for the plan that will not see the light of day, London is, in fact, about to give birth to the Border security command, a kind of British Frontex which will rely on the intelligence services and use the powers conferred by anti-terrorism regulations to stop, in the premier’s statements, trafficking networks.

According to data compiled by the Guardian, approximately 21,400 people have crossed the Channel during the current year, slightly more than in 2023 but less than half as many as in 2022, when a record figure of more than 45,700 people was reached. In the past week alone, over 2,000 asylum seekers have landed in the UK, including more than 600 on August 28 alone. The Le Portel shipwreck is the tragedy that has claimed the most victims in 2024 (whose total has exceeded 30) and is the latest after the one last August 11, where two people lost their lives.