Crime gangs behind the “small boats” human trafficking are resorting to increasingly dangerous tactics, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned with up to 75 people having drowned in the Channel so far this year.
She issued the warning after a meeting in London of the Calais Group, which includes the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, on how to step up action to smash the gangs.
“At this important forum, all Calais Group partners agreed to jointly deliver the Calais Group Priority Plan in 2025,” said Ms Cooper.
“The Priority Plan contains actions which will deliver enhanced cooperation in 2025, taking a whole of route approach to tackle the end-to-end criminality of migrant smuggling networks who continue to deploy more dangerous tactics, putting lives at risk.”
After a series of drowning tragedies in the Channel when “small boats” have sunk, the International Organisation for Migration puts the total number of people “missing” in the waters between France and Britain at 75 so far this year.
As organised crime gangs (OGCs) have come under growing pressure from police and security agencies they have resorted to filling boats with ever greater number of migrants, sometimes double as many as previously.
At times, they have taken out the hard flood of the boats to cram more people into them.
More than 33,000 migrants have made the perilous crossing of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes so far this year, more than in all of 2023, though fewer than in 2022.
More than 70 people have perished in the attempts this year, according to UK officials, making 2024 the deadliest since the number of Channel crossings began surging in 2018
Ms Cooper stressed that key areas of collaboration to target the gangs include:
* Tackling the use of social media by the gangs to recruit and advertise “dangerous” journeys across Europe and the Channel to migrants.
* Strengthening work through Europol to better target and disrupt prominent OCGs and their criminal supply chains through deepening intelligence and information sharing.
* Sharper focus on evolving tactics and targeting the end-to-end criminality of the Kurdish/Iraqi OCGs involved in the smuggling of migrants into and across Europe.
* Coordinating preventative communications to deter irregular migrants from paying OCGs to facilitate dangerous journeys.
* Targeting the illicit finance models of migrant smuggling networks.
* Bringing to justice more crime bosses behind the human trafficking trade.
The UK and Germany are pledging to better share intelligence and expertise against the people-smuggling gangs, with many of the boats used stored in Germany before being driven for four or five hours to be launched on a French beach.
Ms Cooper was on Tuesday also laying out more details of the Government’s Border Security Command, at the centre of its strategy to address the “small boats” crisis, having ditched the Tories controversial Rwanda deportation scheme.
