At least 12 people died Tuesday after a boat carrying migrants capsized off the coast of northern France as they attempted to cross the English Channel, French authorities said, marking the deadliest incident this year in the waterway as the French and British governments scramble to prevent the perilous crossing attempts.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said on the social network X that the ship sank off Wimereux, in an area of Pas-de-Calais where several similar tragedies have occurred this year. Two people are still missing and several others have been injured, Mr. Darmanin said.
“All government services are mobilized to find the missing and take care of the victims,” he said.
French maritime authorities said in a statement that dozens of people fell overboard after their ship encountered unspecified difficulties Tuesday morning off Cap Gris-Nez, which is in some places less than 30 miles from the British coast.
Rescuers have rescued 65 people, some in critical condition, and rescue operations involving helicopters, fishing vessels and the French Navy are continuing, maritime authorities said in a statement. Frédéric Cuvillier, mayor of Boulogne-sur-Mer, a neighboring town, said in a statement that nearly 70 people were on board the boat at the time of the sinking.
French authorities have not identified the deceased, nor specified their origins or the causes of death.
One of the worst migrant accidents in the Channel occurred in 2021, when 27 people died after their boat capsized, but similar tragedies have occurred several times on a smaller scale. Five people also died at sea in January near Wimereux; five people died in similar circumstances nearby in April.
Last week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to strengthen cooperation across the Channel and dismantle people-smuggling networks, which authorities on both sides of the waterway blame for the repeated deaths.
“The leaders agreed to do more together to disrupt upstream smuggling routes and to increase intelligence sharing,” Mr Starmer’s office said in a statement after the two leaders met in Paris.
Nearly 36,000 people trying to reach Britain were subject to search and rescue operations in the English Channel in 2023, according to a report by French maritime authorities, compared with more than 51,000 in 2022.
But the average number of people per boat has increased from 30 to 50, making the crossing even more perilous, the report said. Last year, 12 people attempting the crossing lost their lives in the French search and rescue zone, the report said.
The English Channel is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Its waters are particularly icy in winter, winds can be fierce and migrants trying to cross often crowd into flimsy inflatable boats.
“This is a particularly dangerous area even when the sea seems calm,” maritime authorities said in their statement on Tuesday.
Most migrants attempting to cross the Channel leave from Pas-de-Calais. Many come from Afghanistan, Albania, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan and Syria, according to French authorities, and gather in makeshift camps on the coast of northern France before attempting the crossing.
Many prefer to risk the trip rather than stay in France because they see Britain as an attractive destination with a strong English-speaking job market, or because they already have family there or people they know from their home country.
At least 19,294 people have arrived in England via the Channel on small boats since the start of 2024, according to UK government data, a number comparable to the number of arrivals in the first eight months of the previous year.
The arrival of small boats across the Channel has become a major point of political tension in Britain after the former Conservative government vowed to “stop the boats” and outlined a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Mr Starmer’s Labour government announced after a landslide victory in July that it was abandoning the plans. But since then, the issue of immigration has been at the centre of debate, with far-right riots rocking several cities across Britain this summer.
Although the number of boat arrivals has increased significantly since 2018, they represent only a fraction of overall immigration to Britain, and the majority of people making the crossing are asylum seekers fleeing war and persecution.
According to the Oxford University Migration Observatory, around 93% of people who arrived on small boats between 2018 and March 2024 applied for asylum, and of those who received a decision by 31 March 2024, around three-quarters were successful.
Yvette Cooper, the British Home Secretary, whose office oversees immigration into the country, called Tuesday’s deaths a “horrific and deeply tragic incident.”
“The gangs involved in this appalling and cruel trade in human life are cramming more and more people onto increasingly unseaworthy boats and sending them across the Channel even in very bad weather,” she said. “They care about nothing but the profits they make from it.”
Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, a British charity that supports asylum seekers and refugees, said in a statement Tuesday that “the number of deaths in the Channel this year has been shockingly high.”
British and French officials agreed last year that Britain would pay France 541 million pounds, currently worth more than $700 million, over three years to help fund drones, a new detention center and hundreds of extra police officers to patrol France’s northern beaches — one of several deals the two countries have struck in recent years to try to reduce the number of crossings.
But “repression alone is not enough,” Solomon said. “The tightening of security and law enforcement measures on French coasts has led to increasingly perilous crossings, with departures from more dangerous locations and fragile and overloaded boats.”
He added that the UK government must take action against criminal gangs who are often responsible for smuggling people across the Channel, but also “must develop a plan to improve and expand safe routes for those seeking safety”.
nytimes Eur
