The French police watchdog has launched an inquiry after amateur video footage appeared to show policemen in Calais beating and kicking migrants who had been hiding in lorries hoping to cross to the UK.
The video, posted online by the group Calais Migrant Solidarity, appears to show officers stopping migrants on the motorway branch leading to the Calais ferry port. They can be seen shoving, kicking and beating migrants, pushing them over a guardrail or forcing them to the ground. At one point a police vehicle slows and an occupant appears to spray teargas at close range at migrants walking along the road.
Calais Migrant Solidarity said the footage was shot from 8am onwards on 5 May, the day after a visit by the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve.
The police directorate said in a statement: “The exact circumstances of this intervention will be rapidly examined … and any failure to apply the ethical rules will be punished.”
The state prosecutor, Jean-Pierre Valensi, based in nearby Boulogne-sur-Mer, told AFP he had summoned the police’s internal inspection body over the footage, which he said showed acts that were “liable to be classed as criminal … if they are proven”.
Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, tweeted that he was worried about police violence against migrants in Calais. He said: “The inquiry must allow the perpetrators to be sanctioned,” and any violence must stop.
The French state has repeatedly denied allegations of police violence against migrants in the northern port.
This year a Human Rights Watch report denounced what it called “routine” violence by police against migrants as they walked along streets in Calais or as they tried to hide in lorries hoping to reach Britain.
Migrants described to Human Rights Watch being kicked, punched, beaten with truncheons and teargassed in the face. One migrant said in the report: “They sprayed us as if we were insects. It has happened to all of us in the street.”
Police in the Pas-de-Calais département said more than 300 migrants – double the daily average of 150 – arrived on Tuesday on roads leading to the Channel tunnel.
With rail and sea links across the Channel, Calais has long been a hub for migrants hoping to reach the UK. Numbers have risen since spring 2014 as more people flee conflict and repression in Sudan, Syria, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
More than 1,000 migrants are sleeping rough in an open-air shanty town known as the “new jungle” after state authorities pushed them away from the city centre to a patch of wasteland seen as a “tolerated zone”.
