A young boy rides his bicycle outside the Jungle Books Cafe in the “Jungle” migrant camp on Sept. 6 in Calais, France. The French government has said it will demolish the camp before the end of the year. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
PARIS — The British government announced Monday that the country will begin accepting eligible children from the Calais migrant camp in northern France within “a week at the most.”
Speaking in Parliament on Monday evening, Home Secretary Amber Rudd told British lawmakers that she expects aid organizations to give her a list in the coming days of the children who qualify by having relatives in Britain and who are stranded in Calais seeking to enter the country. Some have been stuck for more than a year; others have since disappeared.
Rudd’s deadline follows the French government’s recent pledge to demolish what is known as Calais’s “Jungle” camp before the end of the year. Although no details have been provided, the leaders of humanitarian organizations said that the planned demolitions could begin Monday morning.
When the French government demolished a crowded portion of the Jungle earlier this year, 129 unaccompanied children vanished, according to census figures collected by Help Refugees, a British aid organization. There is no official census of the Jungle’s population.
Charlotte Morris, an official at Safe Passage UK, the group drafting Rudd’s list, said that she and her colleagues are working to ensure that the same does not happen this time. Already, Morris added, the group has lost contact with 50 of the 178 children in Calais with family in Britain that they had reported to the Home Office in August.
Earlier this year, one Kindertransport survivor, Alf Dubs, 84, a member of Britain’s House of Lords, successfully sponsored an amendment to an immigration bill to bring 3,000 unaccompanied children to Britain in a similar fashion. But since his amendment passed in May, only about 50 such children have actually crossed the English Channel.
On Monday, Rudd blamed French bureaucracy for the delay. Meanwhile, Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, appealed to Dubs and his supporters. As he told France’s RTL radio before meeting in London with Rudd, “I solemnly ask Britain to live up to its moral duty.”
In an interview, Dubs said he had heard nothing regarding the logistics to follow the upcoming transfers.
Speaking from experience, he said, “the important thing to get right is a safe family environment.”
“A lot of them don’t show it, but they are quite shocked,” he added, referring to a recent visit to the Jungle. “They need a sympathetic environment in which they can feel safe and secure, and to recover from the trauma they’ve suffered.”
