Over 30 people have died after their boat capsized in the English Channel in a shocking turn in the UK's migrant crisis.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee in response to the migrant deaths in the English Channel, Downing Street said
The French AFP news agency initially reported five deaths as Gerald Darmanin confirmed on Twitter that a boat had sunk in the Channel with several dead.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said 33 people drowned, including five women and a little girl.
France’s prime minister said the shipwreck on Wednesday was a “tragedy” and his thoughts were with “victims of criminal smugglers who exploit their distress and injury”.
More than 25,000 people have made the dangerous crossing from France to the UK by boat so far this year, a sharp rise on the 8,404 in 2020 - and far more than in years before the pandemic, when most asylum seekers arrived by plane, ferry or train.
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson have come under intense pressure from their own MPs over the high number of illegal migrants.
Patel this week provoked anger by blaming Scottish councils for not playing their part in the Home Office dispersal policy to ayslum hotels.
Robina Qureshi, Director of Positive Action in Housing, a Scottish refugee and migrant homelessness and human rights charity, issued a furious condemnation of the UK government policy on migrants.
She said: “Letting refugees drown is not asylum policy, it’s tantamount to collateral murder by governments that should know by heart the lessons of the Second World War.
“Instead of finding a humanitarian answer, they have stopped rescue missions and sounded dog whistles to the far right. The more that governments try to stop refugees arriving, the more they fuel the human trafficking trade, and the more refugees who will risk death by drowning in order to take a chance at fleeing persecution, in order to reach family already here and saving loved ones back home.”
Qureshi added: “Stopping refugees from reaching the U.K. goes against the Geneva convention on refugees. They have a basic human right to seek safe sanctuary here.
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