Reuters – Around 800 unaccompanied minors are living in the Calais camp.
The UK government is failing young refugees and must be held to account, Lord Dubs said this weekend.
The Labour peer, who himself fled Nazi Germany as a refugee in 1939, told MP Stella Creasy that he was “disappointed and angry” with Prime Minister Theresa May’s government.
“They’ve virtually done nothing, and we’ve all got to keep the maximum pressure going on the government – they’ve got to do what they’re supposed to do, which is to help some of these children come to Britain for safety,” Lord Dubs said.
He was speaking during a trip to the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp on the edge of Calais, where thousands of people – including around 800 unaccompanied minors – are living. Both he and Creasy, MP for Walthamstow in East London, were there with charities Help Refugees and Safe Passage to bring attention to the deteriorating situation.
Conditions are poor, and residents are facing being made homeless again after French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve vowed to dismantle the camp in stages.
Authorities would go ahead with the demolition “with the greatest determination”, Cazeneuve said on Friday, and more police would be stationed in Calais “to reinforce the battle” against refugees and migrants trying to smuggle themselves across the Channel to the UK.
Médecins Sans Frontières warned on Tuesday that the crisis in Calais was “getting progressively worse”.
Lord Dubs urged the French and British authorities to work together to help set up a functional asylum process, and said he was “desperately worried” for unaccompanied refugee children who are stranded in the camp alone.
“This is no life for young people, this is no existence,” he said. “They are very cheerful, some of them, but they’ve been through traumas on their way here, and they really deserve a better future, and they ought to get to a safe country like Britain, go to school and get on with their lives.”
He continued: “The refugee issue is a major one, refugee children should be dealt with properly under the terms of the immigration act, and we should pressure the government to get on with it. That’s the government’s obligation and we should push them to doing it.
“Political will can do a great deal, but I haven’t seen much political will yet.”
