Published: 08 December 2025. The English Chronicle Desk. The English Chronicle Online.
The narrow beaches of northern France have become one of Europe’s most dangerous border zones. A major new report, compiled by seventeen refugee and human rights organisations working on the ground in Calais, Grande-Synthe and Dunkirk, together with six British organisations, concludes that the United Kingdom’s multi-million-pound policy of “stopping the boats” has dramatically increased violence, loss of life and the power of people-smuggling gangs, yet has failed to reduce Channel crossings.
The The 176-page document, published this week by the Humans for Rights Network, draws on thousands of direct testimonies from asylum seekers, doctors, lawyers and aid workers. It paints a grim picture of daily police operations funded by British taxpayers that routinely involve teargas, rubber bullets and forced evictions, alongside a sharp rise in armed violence between rival smuggling networks.
Despite more than £700 million paid to France since 2014 to secure the border, the number of people reaching Britain in small boats remains stubbornly high. Provisional Home Office figures show that 39,404 people have already made the journey in 2025, higher than the whole of last year and only slightly below the 2022 record of 45,774.
Far from deterring desperate people, the report argues that intensified security has simply made the crossing more lethal. In 2024 a record 89 men, women and children died attempting to reach Britain. The toll for 2025 is already mounting. At least four people have been shot dead in and around the Loon-Plage camp near Dunkirk this year alone. A sixteen-year-old autistic Sudanese boy told researchers how smugglers pressed a pistol to his temple when his family could not pay the full fee.
On the French side of the Channel, British money has funded a near-constant cycle of camp clearances. Human Rights Observers recorded more than 800 evictions in northern France in 2024, displacing at least 16,365 people. Tents, sleeping bags and identification documents are regularly confiscated or destroyed. Utopia 56 documented 680 separate incidents of police violence between March and September 2025, affecting 680 individuals who were not even attempting to board boats at the time.
Doctors working with Médecins du Monde in Calais report that eighty-eight per cent of the injuries they treat are directly linked to appalling living conditions and repeated forced marches between temporary camps. Severe chemical burns from cheap dinghy fuel are now commonplace. One consultant described patients arriving with feet “macerated to the bone” inside soaked trainers after walking dozens of kilometres following failed launches.
The report reserves particular criticism for the absence of safe and legal routes. By closing almost every regular pathway to claim asylum in Britain, successive governments have left smuggling gangs as the only option for most refugees. “By allowing smuggling networks to decide who is and isn’t allowed to cross, the UK and French governments have handed over the fundamental right of access to asylum to organised criminal networks,” the authors write.
Lily MacTaggart, coordinator at Humans for Rights Network, said the situation had become intolerable. “The violence at the UK-France border is now endemic. It is causing acute emotional distress and lifelong damage to people’s physical and mental health. Britain and France are jointly responsible for funding this violence and for policies that abuse human rights and, in some cases, cause death.”
The organisations are calling for an immediate statutory public inquiry into how British funding and policy decisions have contributed to rising deaths and smuggler dominance. They also demand the urgent creation of humanitarian visas and expanded family reunion rights so that people no longer feel forced to risk their lives.
When the report was sent to the Home Office in advance of publication, officials declined to engage with its findings. A spokesperson repeated the government’s standard line that small boat crossings are “shameful” and praised the partnership with France, claiming it had already prevented more than 21,000 attempts this year. France’s interior ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Aid workers on both sides of the Channel insist the current approach is not only cruel but counterproductive. As one experienced Calais volunteer told researchers: “Every time they make it harder, the smugglers just raise their prices and take bigger risks. The boats get more overcrowded, the engines more unreliable, and more people die. Nothing changes except the body count.”
With winter approaching and temperatures already dropping below freezing at night, charities are bracing themselves for further tragedy unless the British government fundamentally changes course.
