A senior Belgian officer has thrown his weight behind plans for a naval blockade in the Channel after a spike in small boat launches from coastal towns close to the French border.
Christiaan De Ridder, Deputy Chief of West Flanders Police, said: "We have to stop them before they get to the UK. We have to find a way to stop them on the water. If we could put up a naval barrier so they don't get into French waters, everything would stop."
The call follows reports that criminal smuggling gangs have moved part of their operations across the border into Belgium, exploiting a gap created by pledges of tougher French coastal policing. Boats leaving Belgian shores have been known to pick up additional passengers from remote sections of the Dunkirk and Calais coastline.
Belgian police have made 40 arrests of suspected traffickers and detained more than 360 migrants since the start of the year, recording approximately 30 crossings — an enforcement record that dwarfs anything seen on the French side of the border.
France has faced mounting criticism for allowing dinghies to be guided towards British waters rather than turned back, a practice that continues despite the crossings being illegal and widely acknowledged to be run by organised crime, reports the BBC.
The anger is compounded by Britain having pledged £660 million to France over three years specifically to tackle the crossings. Footage from Gravelines beach near Dunkirk appeared to contradict French pledges of stepped-up patrols, showing migrants boarding a vessel with no officers in sight.
Active enforcement by French officers is extremely unusual. The rare occasion last week when police deflated a migrant dinghy on a Calais beach resulted in the officers being referred to a human rights watchdog.
Scenes in the Belgian seaside town of Middlekerke, about an hour from Calais, have shown migrants sprinting through residential streets to reach the beach and board vessels.
The developments follow the Channel crossing total breaching 200,000 for the first time since monitoring began in 2018.
The Mayor of Dunkirk, Jean Marie Emmery, dismissed the Belgian approach as unnecessary, arguing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme that legislative reform was the only viable solution.
"We don't need that," he said. "We need a change of the law. We need a change in Great Britain and in Europe and in Belgium and then it will stop."
