The United Kingdom and France have reached an agreement on additional measures to curb migration across the Channel. This was announced by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday during a press conference after their first official bilateral meeting in Paris.
The British will contribute 541 million pounds (more than 612 million euros) to anti-migration measures on the French side of the Channel over the next three years. There will be a new detention center for migrants staying on the northern French coast and 500 extra officers will be deployed to patrol the beaches. Investments are also being made in drones and other surveillance equipment. This means that the UK will invest significantly more in cooperation with France in the field of migration. The UK will allocate an average of £159 million for this in the coming years, while that amount will be ‘only’ this year. 64 million pounds is.
The new agreements are in line with increasingly intensive cooperation between the two states to reduce the number of boats carrying migrants across the Channel. In November, Sunak and Macron, who had just taken office at the time, also agreed to intensify their cooperation, with France, among other things, granting British officials access to French territory for the first time to monitor, with the aim of improving mutual information exchange and coordination. .
At the press conference on Friday, it was striking that Sunak spoke several times about “joint efforts” to tackle the problems surrounding migration. This is a break with the past, where predecessors of the British Prime Minister repeatedly placed responsibility with the French. Macron underlined during the press conference that his country has no intention of taking back migrants who have already made the crossing – something the British have been insisting on for some time.
NRC this week looked ahead to the meeting between France and the UK. Read also: The ‘little kings’ Macron and Sunak want a fresh start
Closer co-operation
In addition to migration, the war in Ukraine was also a topic of discussion. The UK and France want to jointly train soldiers from the Ukrainian navy and the heads of government have announced that they will work together on the development of complex weapons of war. There would also be an “ambitious new energy partnership” that focuses on sustainable energy to ensure that “Putin can never again use our energy security as a weapon”. It should also become easier for school classes to travel to another country.
With these new agreements, Macron and Sunak seem to want to show that a new period has begun in which the United Kingdom and France will visit each other more often. This after relations had cooled in recent years due to, among other things, Brexit and the incalculable amount of Sunak’s predecessor Boris Johnson. King Charles III will also travel to France at the end of March for his first foreign state visit since taking office.