Thread: Calais 'Jungle': France urges UK to take more children

Calais 'Jungle': France urges UK to take more children

29 October 2016 From the section Europe

France's president has urged Britain to take its share of responsibility for migrant children who remain in Calais after the "Jungle" camp was cleared.

Francois Hollande said 1,500 unaccompanied minors who were still in the port city would be taken to accommodation centres very shortly.

Migrants fleeing war and poverty had used the sprawling Jungle site as a staging post to try and reach the UK.

The UK has so far agreed to take in about 250 of the children from there.

A government spokesperson said the UK remained "firmly committed to working with the French to safeguard and protect children who remain in Calais - and that includes transferring eligible children to the UK safely and as soon as possible".

The Jungle had been seen as a key symbol of Europe's failure to deal with the worst migrant crisis since World War Two.

At least 1,500 minors have been staying at a special container camp at the site, but it has been full and many children have also reportedly been sleeping rough.

Mr Hollande said he and UK Prime Minister Theresa May had discussed British officials processing them in France with a view to rehousing them in the UK.

"I talked yesterday [Friday] with the British prime minister, as [French Interior Minister] Bernard Cazeneuve did with his British counterpart, so that the British can go to those centres with those minors and take their share to welcome them in Britain," he said.

Mr Hollande was speaking during a visit to an accommodation centre for migrants in Doue-la-Fontaine in western France.

He hailed the evacuation of the Calais Jungle as a success.

"There were no incidents from start to finish," Mr Hollande said. "We had to rise to the challenge of the refugee issue. We could not tolerate the camp and we will not tolerate any others."

He added the encampments springing up in the capital Paris would be forced to close.

Many of the 5,000 people evacuated from the Jungle have been taken to reception centres around France, where they are being processed and will be able to apply for asylum.

But aid workers believe that hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of migrants, might have fled the area before the clearance operation began last Monday.

Demolition work is continuing and the local authorities say the clearance will be completed by Monday.

Calais 'Jungle': France urges UK to take more children - BBC.com

Nobody knows who these children belong to. They should be sent back to a Safe Middle East country.

Same with all the Unaccompanied Minor's pouring over the USA border...hand them over into the care and custody of THEIR Embassy for deportation...let their President take care of them. Not US Taxpayers!

France prepares to remove thousands of migrants from streets of Paris as numbers grow after Calais 'Jungle' demolition

David Chazan, paris 30 OCTOBER 2016 • 7:01PM

French authorities are preparing to remove up to 2,500 migrants from the streets of Paris within days after camps in the capital swelled following the clearance of the Calais “Jungle” last week.

Some may go to the capital’s first official refugee camp, which could open “in the next few days” according to Ian Brossat, a deputy mayor in charge of housing.

The camp, to shelter about 400 single men, had been due to open in mid-October. The opening was delayed to avoid “overcrowding”, Mr Brossat said.

Signalling a toughening of policy towards migrants pouring into France, most of whom want to cross the Channel illegally to Britain, President François Hollande said those eligible to apply for asylum would be taken to reception centres and others would be deported.

“We could tolerate the camps no longer, and we will not tolerate them,” Mr Hollande said. “We are going to carry out the same operation as in Calais.”

Mr Hollande, criticised for failing to clear the Calais camp years earlierand accused of only ordering its demolition in an attempt to win popularity six months before the presidential election, denied claims that thousands of Calais migrants were streaming into Paris.

“It is not those from Calais who have gone to Paris,” he said. “There are perhaps a few. In contrast, there has been a new influx of migrants from Libya in the last few weeks and months, and they have headed for Paris.”

Migrants wait at a makeshift camp in Paris CREDIT: JOEL SAGET/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, said the camps in northern Paris, some of which are only minutes’ walk from the Eurostar terminal at the Gare du Nord, would be cleared this week.

At one camp near Stalingrad station, where a sprawl of green, blue and red tents are pitched on pavements, surrounded by piles of rubbish, Hamid Hussein, a 22-year old Sudanese, said he had come to the capital from Calais last week.

“They will start calling this the Paris Jungle soon,” he said. “It was getting too difficult to go to England from Calais. I will stay here while me and my friends work out a different way to go there. We don’t want to stay in France.”

Colombe Brossel, a deputy mayor, acknowledged that the camps had grown last week.

“We have seen a big increase,” she said.

However, she estimated there were hundreds of new arrivals rather than thousands.

More than 5,000 migrants from the Calais camp have been taken to reception centres across France.

A row has broken out between France and Britain over which country should take in nearly 1,500 child migrants who are being temporarily sheltered in containers on the site of the “Jungle” camp.

France prepares to remove thousands of migrants from streets of Paris ...