EU migrant crisis: Calais protest to demand closure of the migrant camp known as the Jungle
Thousands of protesters in the French town of Calais are to demand the closure of the migrant camp known as the Jungle.
Form a human chain on the way to the port and they plan to block main roads.
More than 7,000 people now dwell there, in squalid conditions. Many attempt to jump on lorries to reach Britain.
Protesters say the town is undermined by the camp and causes disruption at the port. This is set to function as the biggest demonstration local folks have held against it.
The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, intends to join in as she says the situation is becoming unbearable.
Those living in the camp, who are mostly from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, hope to cross the
Channel, regularly using people traffickers to try to enter illegally.
Demolition teams dismantled huts in the camp within an effort to close it down earlier this year. The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that the government still intends to shut the camp down.
Last week the UK and France pledged to work collectively and “step up” moves to enhance the migrant situation in Calais, by procuring the port more, improving the humanitarian situation for the thousands of displaced people there, and returning illegal migrants who were judged to not be in need of protection to the nations they came from.
Several days after, campaigners said they’d identified nearly 400 unaccompanied kids in the camp who were eligible to move to the UK. They urged the UK authorities to take those kids in. The UK has dedicated to giving 150 children a dwelling in 2016.
One Sudanese asylum seeker inside the camp told the BBC he was saddened by the way local people seen them, and said all the migrants wanted was to live after escaping from conflict.
