France reacted violently to a “banal, unacceptable and totally inappropriate” letter from Boris Johnson to the authorities. Emmanuel Macron Regarding immigration strait crossing points.
French Minister of the Interior Cancelled the planned high-level meeting with Priti Patel, the Secretary of the Interior,, And government spokesman Gabriel Attal (Gabriel Attal) said that France is “bored” with the “double talk and outsourcing issues” in the UK.
The fact that Johnson chose to make this letter public is at least as irritating to Paris as the content of the letter. Officials stated that Macron, who had not seen the letter before Johnson’s tweet, called it “surprising,” and added: “A leader does not communicate on issues such as this, through tweets and The subsequent letters to the public.”
Johnson’s letter lists five steps to “saving lives and combating traffickers.” Some are not controversial. Technologies such as sensors and radars have been deployed to some extent-some funded by the British government-and widely used drones equipped with night vision cameras and patrols equipped with thermal imaging binoculars.
Further cooperation in this area, as well as mutual maritime patrols and aerial surveillance, is clearly possible: the British and French coast guards and maritime rescue services have worked closely together in the strait.
The sharing of intelligence on human smugglers is also not a specific issue-although Brexit has not made it easier for the UK and EU police to work together. In fact, Patel and her French opponent, Gérald Darmanin, promised to “enhance intelligence sharing and police cooperation” after a video conference last week.
Other suggestions are not so simple. France So far, on the grounds of sovereignty issues, he is reluctant to consider joint patrols. French officials have asked how the UK might think about letting French soldiers patrol its coastline if the situation is reversed.
The potential objection to this approach is that France believes that increasing the number of officers patrolling the coast is not a solution. Paris argued that there are currently more than 600 police and military police patrolling the strait 24 hours a day, and more and more night patrols have prevented 65% of border crossings.
When immigrants and traffickers can hide in the sand dunes of more than 40 miles of coastline, show up after the patrol has passed, and launch a boat within 10 minutes, officials who have worked in the area for many years said that this requires police officers every 100 Code to stop them.
Instead, France proposes to establish a joint processing center on French soil, where British immigration officials can review asylum applications in the UK.
But what seemed to have triggered the most violent reaction was Johnson’s final proposal, namely, the bilateral return agreement with France and the negotiation of the establishment of the UK-EU return agreement. As the UK leaves the EU, it can no longer use the EU’s Dublin system to send migrants back to the first member country they entered. So far, it has not negotiated any bilateral deals. Macron has repeatedly expressed the view of France that France is only a transit country for a small portion (about 3%) of immigrants entering the EU with the UK as their preferred final destination. The only long-term solution is greater European cooperation to resolve Europe— —It’s actually a global — problem.
It was this kind of grandstanding proposals that Paris saw as a political interest that angered France. In addition to fisheries disputes, the Aukus statement and ongoing discussions about Northern Ireland, they reinforced the impression that Johnson was first performing in a domestic gallery in Paris.
A senior French government official on Friday accused the United Kingdom of being “dual-faced”, saying that London is playing a “double game” by actively cooperating on specific technical issues—sometimes even successfully—and at the same time “sending the opposite message to the country. “. Consumption is purely for political purposes.”
For Paris, Johnson’s letter was clearly a provocation. “immediately Boris Johnson There is a problem,” Attar said, “he thinks it is Europe’s responsibility to solve it. It doesn’t work like that-it works through cooperation. “
