Nearly 20 migrant associations and groups denounce a "call to denounce" the Ministry of the Interior's advertising campaign "Help us save lives", which aims to prevent migrants from trying to cross the Channel aboard makeshift boats.
These advertisements published since June in the regional press call on readers to be "attentive to unusual nocturnal gatherings on the beach suggesting departures", to "call the police or gendarmerie" and "report any non-marine behavior" between others, to "help save lives and combat human trafficking and criminal networks". According to blue-white-red advertising, 350 "endangered migrants were rescued" at sea in 2018.
"An attempt to turn every citizen into a police auxiliary"
"This advertising is neither more nor less than a call to the denunciation, an attempt to turn every citizen into police auxiliary, as if the exiles who seek to win England were delinquents," write in a statement the 18 signatories, including the League of Human Rights-Dunkirk and Auberge des migrants.
"It is the hypocritical policy of non-reception of the French and English governments that pushes the exiles to take a maximum of risk," they continue. "Once (these people) 'saved', what do they become? They risk being locked up in a detention center, threatened with expulsion or finally thrown back into the camps they hoped to leave." According to the associations, "it is not the sea or the mountains that kill, but the closing of borders and European migration policies".
Gabriel d'Harcourt, Deputy Director General of the Voix du Nord who broadcasts this advertisement, explained in his newspaper, considering that "the message is to help the police to intervene when citizens are witnesses of events that can put lives in danger ". Migrants regularly try to cross from the coast of Nord-Pas-de-Calais on board makeshift boats, despite the danger linked to the density of traffic, strong currents and the low temperature of the water.