Desperate #migrants risk life and limb in channel crossing--what will be their fate? #Bernard Andonian, Gulbenkian #Andonian Solicitors
In recent weeks boatloads of migrants have crossed the channel undetected, encouraging others to risk life and limb by trying to reach Britain. Most flee poverty and destitution in their country.
Imagine how desperate is the plight of these migrants with children and in some cases babies whose families are prepared to risk their lives for a better future in Britain.
This is also with regret, a lucrative time for criminals, smuggling migrants to Britain for profit. To obviate paying criminal gangs, some migrants with limited funds, club together to hire boats while those with more money turn to people smuggling gangs who charge Iranians, Afghans, Africans from Sierra Leon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and indeed others, living in squalor first in the home countries and then in reaching France, Calais, approximately €12,000 (￡10,600) each to cross the channel in boats that are hired, purchased or indeed stolen.
These migrants are desperate and therefore will believe mostly what they are told, in the same way that they will believe mostly what they are told by crooked immigration advisers and lawyers once they reach British soil, who know little or nothing about immigration, and cheat these vulnerable individuals out of thousands of pounds. Furthermore, gangs rush migrants into making the crossing by telling them that it will become more difficult to enter Britain next year after Brexit.
French officials have detected around 40 illegal attempts to cross the channel by boats this year, including 28 since 1st October. This compares with 13 last year and 23 in 2016. A total of 123 migrants have been rescued from the channel last month, including families with children and toddlers.
Migrants are crossing in extremely dangerous conditions. Some cross at night when the water temperature is well below freezing than during the day, to obviate detection, and when there are strong currents, the weather changing quickly; the channel is probably the world’s busiest waterway, catering for 20 to 25% of the global maritime traffic.
Most migrants make their way from their countries of origin by lorry and on foot, and are held by agents whom they have paid, in containers on ships or lorries, until they reach Calais, when they try their luck for Britain.
Many of the Iranian migrants in Calais have travelled by flight through Serbia which abolished visas for them last year. Belgrade reinstated a visa requirement however last month after the EU complained that 12,000 out of 40,000 also Iranians who flew in under the scheme never returned to Iran. They had left Iran taking advantage of the Serbian Visa waiver to seek a better life.
Many arrived in Belgrade just before the Visa free travel was rescinded as aforesaid. They travelled through Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy and France. Some were beaten by Croatian police and had to endure hundreds of kilometers trek over the Slovenian mountains before reaching Calais. There, those with little funds either try to board a lorry going to Britain, or club together to purchase a boat, or rely on people smugglers to take them to the UK.
Once they are in British waters, or on land, in the latter case usually left to fend for themselves on a motorway or a secluded country road, migrants are usually picked up by port search and rescue operations or police and taken to the nearest port or police station. Immigration officers are usually present. Most have no documentation on them, and lie as to their country of nationality or residence, and about their age, to make it difficult for the immigration authorities to remove them, so that they can increase their chances of a successful claim to stay in the UK. This in due course precipitates the authorities in Britain requesting the migrant concerned to undergo a language test to ascertain the country of nationality or residence, and an age assessment test to see whether in fact the migrant is a minor as alleged, or not.
Once on British soil detained for questioning, migrants may then claim asylums under the Geneva Convention on the States of refugees 1951 and its 1967 protocol, stating that they fear return to their country of origin for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion or imputed political opinion. This means that it will take many months for their case to be assessed. If they have already been given international protection in some other third country, but preferred to come to Britain, or have applied for asylum and have thus been registered in another EU state, in theory it should be possible to return them under the Dublin Convention. Few are ever sent back however, citing a variety of reasons such as breach of their human rights, and their desire to join with their families in Britain and so on.
The figures for 2017 show 314 asylum seekers were transferred to another EU state from where they had come to the UK to have their claim dealt with, despite the UK making 5712 requests for transfers but receiving either no answer or a refusal for various reasons to accept the transfer.
Those who are minor children, and where the British government considers that there are insufficient reception facilities in their country of origin to accept them, are usually granted discretionary leave to remain under the Home Office policy until they are 17 ? years of age. Once they visa is about to expire, they usually apply either for further leave to remain or for asylum.
If protection is refused (asylum or humanitarian protection), they may succeed on article 8 grounds, that is to say on private and or family life arguments under the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 (ECHR) and only after they fail in their application, and all avenues of appeal are exhausted (including all judicial reviews, further additional submissions and fresh claims), will they at that stage, perhaps face removal.
It is however a fact that relatively very few cases reach a stage whereby a migrant is put back on a plane and returned with immigration officers on board a flight to his or her country of nationality or residence from where that individual fled. Even at that stage, if there is a risk of suicide if removed, immigration officers will not forcibly take action to remove the individual. A situation can arise therefore whereby after several attempts to try to remove an individual who has threatened to commit suicide, immigration authorities may simply let that individual out and into the public domain. What happens to such a person thereafter is anybody’s guess.