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The Jungle in Calais
Clothes and personal belongings lie on the ground as migrants queue during food distribution at the Jungle in Calais. Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters
Clothes and personal belongings lie on the ground as migrants queue during food distribution at the Jungle in Calais. Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters

UN official calls for asylum assessment centre in Calais

This article is more than 8 years old

Peter Sutherland condemns ‘shameful’ French and British failure to help people living in squalid conditions and risking lives trying to cross Channel

A senior UN official has called on the UK and France to open a permanent centre in Calais where people wanting to claim asylum in Britain can have their cases heard without risking their lives trying to cross the Channel.

Peter Sutherland, the United Nations special representative on migration, said he was “sickened” by the conditions in the Jungle after a visit last week to the camp, which is home to more than 3,000 people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and east Africa. He called on both governments to do more to address the situation before more people died.

“I was horrified by the place. It is absolutely shocking, and while the primary responsibility is held by the French because it is in France, there should be a shared responsibility,” Sutherland said. “You would think both governments would work together to solve this – after all, it is only 3,000 people, it should not be above redemption.”

More than a dozen people have died trying to get on UK-bound lorries or trains this summer. Last week, a teenager from east Africa died in the Channel tunnel, and the week before a man died after being electrocuted at the tunnel entrance. He was found on the roof of a freight train.

Sutherland said the situation in Calais was a “stain on Europe” and said a centre should be opened where asylum claims could be assessed and dealt with in a “sane and humane fashion”.

He said: “You could set up an immediate system for assessing how many of these people are refugees. You could do it in a very short time and you could do it as a joint responsibility.”

Sutherland said the UN and major aid agencies were overwhelmed by the migration crisis sweeping Europe, and insisted the UK and French governments should take responsibility for the situation in Calais.

“[The UN and other agencies] are inundated with what they are trying to do in the countries that are taking millions of refugees, and here we have 3,000 people in what one might describe as two of the wealthiest countries in the world and they are just being left there. It is just shameful.”

Under intense pressure, David Cameron agreed to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees into the UK over five years, but he said no one in the Calais camp would be accepted in case it encouraged more to make the journey.Sutherland dismissed the idea that treating people in the Jungle humanely would act as a significant pull factor. “This stuff about pull factors … I am sick of it,” he said. “It is sickening that people are using that as an excuse to leave people living in absolute squalor.”

There has been growing tension in the Jungle in the past week, with a series of clashes between the police and migrants. On Friday hundreds of people from the camp took part in a protest against what they said was the “violence and racism” of the French authorities.

Although there has been widespread condemnation of the way some central European countries – particularly Hungary – have dealt with the migrant crisis, Sutherland said too little attention had been paid the actions of the French and British governments in Calais. “This is not about how this situation fits into the overall mosaic of the arguments relating to immigration, this is just a violation of the rights of individuals of an utterly appalling kind and we can not allow it to go on,” he said.

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