It’s hard to know how to start a piece on the issue of Channel crossings in the weeks following the tragic death of at least 4 people in the freezing waters between the UK and France. There is grief, anger, frustration, a feeling of injustice; so many emotions jostle for space on the page. Both sides of the debate, when reaching for a solution to the repeated tragedies in the Channel, draw on moral arguments to defend their position. And the deaths continue.
Everyone agrees that the deaths must stop, that the Channel is a dangerous and ill-suited route for those seeking protection in the UK. But any effort to find a solution that actually reduces the peril faced by people taking this journey to safety is stymied by a relentless commitment to an approach that has proven, over many decades to fail: a policy of deterrence.
Over the decades, deterrence has taken the form of destitution, dispersal, status insecurity, prohibition on working, detention, but was finally formalised with the Conservative’s Hostile Environment measures. In recent years, it has taken a more public and aggressive turn with the ‘let them drown’ policy, use of barracks as accommodation, and by denying access to the asylum process, culminating in the measures brought in by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 including pushbacks, criminalisation, offshoring and a two-tiered asylum system. The Rwanda removals scheme is the most high profile of recent deterrent measures introduced to halt small boat arrivals. What started out as an attempt to make life unbearable for people seeking sanctuary in the UK, has become a punitive regime of exclusion.
And yet the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats continues to rise. More than 45,000 people have arrived in the UK via this route in 2022, which is the highest number since the route came into use in 2018. Over the years leading up to 2018, other limited routes that existed for people seeking to enter the UK ‘irregularly’ to seek protection were effectively shut down by a combination of enforcement and surveillance measures, and then there was Covid. But the flow didn’t disappear, it was just displaced to a more dangerous alternative. So, even on the Government’s own terms, the deterrent approach has neither reduced irregular arrivals nor eliminated the avoidable death of people taking those journeys.
Why doesn’t the fear of hardship and punishment persuade people not to make that journey across the Channel? In short, if the prospect of death in freezing waters is not sufficient to deter you from making the journey, then little else will. Research has repeatedly shown that people have little knowledge of the detail of the UK’s asylum procedure, therefore it can hardly have much effect on the decision to get in the boat.
As recent research by Freedom from Torture explains, many of those in the small boats, including survivors of torture, are ‘fleeing a burning house’. Their priority is achieving the safety necessary for human security and dignity. This includes protection, not just from the persecution they face in their country of origin, but also from the horrors they face en route, including risk to life, family separation and loss, extreme physical hardship, various forms of violence, trafficking and sexual and economic exploitation. Our clients describe journeys through European member states involving detention, racism, destitution, and a lack of access to medical, legal and asylum services. Accounts of torture, detention, enslavement and sexual exploitation are the norm for clients who had travel through Libya.
According to our clients, safety is about so much more than dodging bullets or escaping detention and is what keeps them moving through Europe to the UK. It’s about connections and the human impulse to seek out family, friends and community when you are scared and in need of support. It’s about familiarity and the absolute need to be able to communicate in a language you understand, in order to avoid further exploitation, abuse and isolation. And it’s about hope that your humanity will be recognised and respected in a country renowned for its adherence to international human rights norms.
While all of the above is undoubtedly true for many of those still crossing the Channel in small boats, many others did not actively choose the UK as a destination. Their family members may have predetermined their destination and made arrangements with smugglers, or they may have been trafficked or otherwise ceded control to smugglers.
Sadly none of this information is new. The Home Office commissioned research in 2002 and again in 2020 which revealed many of the same findings. And it is also there in research from 2018. Australia’s horrific experiment with offshore processing is often held up as an example of a successful deterrence policy. But it actually failed to reduce arrivals and it was only maritime pushback operations – a policy blighted by humanitarian and legal issues – that caused arrivals to decrease.
So, why, in the face of all of this evidence, is the Government so committed to the deterrent approach? The Prime Minister appeared to acknowledge the model’s inherent failures in his speech on Tuesday introducing yet more deterrent measures, arguing that “the basis for any solution shouldn’t just be ‘what works’… but what is right”. It’s hard to disagree with that sentiment in its entirety but the shift away from efficacy and towards moral crusade (backed by right-wing think tanks) has been so dramatic that failure is now assumed, accounted for and excused.
Some champions of the deterrent cause attribute its failure to the frustrated attempts to implement key policies, like the Rwanda removals scheme and inadmissibility. Not a single person has been removed to Rwanda under the partnership signed in April and it might be a while longer before anyone else is. Of the nearly 20,000 claims considered as possibly inadmissible to the UK’s asylum system since the start of the expanded procedure in January 2021, only 83 were determined to be so and, of these, only 21 people were returned to a third country.
Some argue that once policies like the Rwanda removal scheme ‘are shown to be real’, they will act as a deterrent. But as experts who have evaluated Australia’s failed offshore processing approach have warned, in order to make such a policy ‘real’ the UK would need to subject people to conditions worse than those they were fleeing. The Government would need to detain and deport women, children, the disabled and victims of torture and trafficking. It would need to bypass national or regional human rights frameworks in order to avoid litigation of that sort that grounded the Rwanda flight. It would need to do all of this in secret to avoid the kind of public activism that forced Privilege Style, the airline hired by the UK to fly refugees to Rwanda, to withdraw from the scheme. And it would need an extremely deep purse. And even then, it still wouldn’t work for all the reasons that research has repeatedly shown.
Wherever we stand on the legality or morality of Channel crossings, we can all agree that no more lives should be lost. The recycling of gimmicks and performative nastiness by this Government will only result in further tragedies.
Freedom from Torture are calling for the Government to urgently expand safe routes to protection through an increase in resettlement and refugee family reunion, and through collaboration with our European neighbours to create safe routes into and through Europe and on to the UK, recognising an element of choice for the person who is moving.
We know that safe routes won’t eliminate irregular arrivals, so Freedom from Torture are also calling for the Government to stop punishing those who arrive without pre-authorisation to seek sanctuary in the UK. All those who reach UK territory and make a claim for asylum should have that claim heard and determined in the UK and face no penalty for their irregular arrival.
