France's Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin called for a treaty on migration between the EU and Britain Tuesday, after 12 migrants died trying to cross the Channel in the worst such incident this year.
Several were injured after their boat carrying dozens ran into trouble off Wimereux, a town some five kilometres from Boulogne-sur-Mer on the northern French coast.
A source close to the investigation said the dead included three minors.
According to the Boulogne-sur-Mer prosecutor, Guirec Le Bras, the migrants who died were mostly from Eritrea. Ten of them were female and two male, he said. Half the total were minors.
Crew on a French government-operated ship, the Minck, were the first to become aware of the emergency and to respond, naval officer Etienne Baggio told French news agency AFP.
French navy helicopters, fishing boats and military vessels were mobilised for the operation, he said.
"Unfortunately, the bottom of the boat ripped open," said Olivier Barbarin, mayor of Le Portel near the fishing port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where a first aid post was set up to treat survivors.
Money alone can't fix the problem
Darmanin, who rushed to the site of the tragedy Tuesday, told reporters that the EU and Britain needed to negotiate a new treaty on migration.
The European Union should seek to "re-establish a traditional migration relationship with our British friends and neighbours", he said, adding that British payments to France to prevent irregular migration covered only "a third of what we are spending," he said.
Under the deal, negotiated by former British prime minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron, London agreed to step up funding to France to total €541 million ($575 million), allowing the deployment of "hundreds" of extra French law enforcement officers along the Channel coast.
But Darmanin said Tuesday that "the tens of millions of euros that we negotiate every year with our British friends" were not sufficient to stem the flow of migrants, many of whom he said wanted to reach Britain to reunite with families or "to work in conditions that would not be acceptable in France".
He listed criteria which, according to him, make the United Kingdom attractive: "often, you can work without having papers" and "as there is no common immigration policy with the EU (... ), people try a lot to go to Great Britain because they know that they are probably not deportable from British territory."
Crackdown on smuggling
The numbers of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats from France to England have been a major bone of contention in post-Brexit relations between Paris and London.
Earlier this summer, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and France's President Emmanuel Macron pledged to strengthen "cooperation" in handling the surge in undocumented migrant numbers.
UK interior minister Yvette Cooper called the latest deaths "horrifying and deeply tragic".
She criticised the "gangs behind this appalling and callous trade in human lives", adding they "do not care about anything but the profits they make".
This year has already seen 25 people die in migrant crossings, up from the 2023 death toll of 12.
On Monday alone, 351 migrants crossed in small boats, with 21,615 making the journey this year, according to UK government statistics.
(with newswires)
