Since the beginning of the year, there have been shipwrecks and tragedies in the English Channel: five people, including two teenagers, died in January; a girl drowned in a canal while the boat she was travelling on was setting sail in March; five migrants died after trying to cross the English Channel on board a boat loaded with 112 people in April; six people died in three separate accidents in July…
On 3 September, ten women and two men, mostly Eritreans, died when their boat sank off Cap Gris-Nez, bringing to thirty-seven the number of migrants who have lost their lives crossing the Canal since January. 2024 has thus become the deadliest year since the start of crossings of this 40-kilometre stretch of sea aboard makeshift boats.
As statistics compiled by the International Organization for Migration as part of the Missing Migrants Project show, migration tragedies are not new in this sector.
Since 2014, at least 280 migrants have died or gone missing while trying to reach British shores from mainland Europe, particularly from Calais. A peak in deaths was reached in 2019, the year before Brexit, when smugglers led migrants to believe that it would be impossible to reach the United Kingdom after its departure from the European Union (EU), scheduled for 31 January 2020.
Initially, the deaths were mainly due to accidents: migrants falling from the trucks in which they were trying to hide or being run over by cars on the motorway leading to the ferry port (from where at least fifty boats depart for England every day, meaning 5,000 to 6,000 trucks pass through on a daily basis) or to access the Eurotunnel (a vast space of 650 hectares, difficult to control).
The increasing blockade imposed by the French and British authorities to prevent access to these two border sites has had the effect of deterring intrusion attempts, falling from more than 15,000 in 2016 to 127 in 2023.
But it also pushed exiles to increasingly try to cross the Channel by sea, aboard small boats: almost 136,000 people crossed the Channel by boat. small boats from France, since the United Kingdom began counting these arrivals in 2018.
Particularly dangerous crossings, as the maritime prefect of the English Channel and the North Sea recalled after the shipwreck on 3 September, take place in one of the maritime zones “the busiest in the world, with more than 600 commercial ships” per day, “particularly dangerous, even when the sea looks beautiful” and where the weather conditions are also “often difficult”.
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