A yacht sailing with eleven migrants from Albania was stopped off the North Sea Coast by the Dutch police and customs investigators. Dutch officers arrested two Ukrainian skippers onboard on suspicion of human smuggling.
The yacht was on its way to Great Britain when it was stopped in the North Sea and was brought to the coastal town of Ouddorp in Zealand. The police spokesman said that recently several boats have been stopped off the Dutch Coast on suspicion of human smuggling and in all the cases the migrants were headed for Great Britain.
The most preferred medium for such human trafficking/smuggling has been the container ships bound for Great Britain sailing from the ports of Rotterdam, Ijmuiden, or Hoek van Holland. In recent times it has been seen that smugglers are using small boats for smuggling people to Europe.
In July the British Officials intercepted or monitored 9 boats carrying at least 50 people off England’s southeast coast. This outnumbers the collective total of 2019 and 2020. There are intelligence reports that say that the organized criminal gangs have now picked up this lucrative trade where they pack a large number of people on boats and launch them across the longer section of North European coastline, dodging the patrols and booking higher profits.
The British law enforcement said that passengers pay as much as $5800 for a seat and gangs pocket around €250,000 on some of the bigger boats. In 2021, around 10,000 people crossed into the UK illegally via sea which is an all-time high record.
In an attempt to counter illegal crossing by boat, the French Government has capped the sale of diesel and petrol in small containers in the Calais region. This year the French had stopped 7500 migrants from reaching the UK but more collective efforts would be required to put the people smugglers out of business.
On the demand side, European countries talk about legal channels of migration but do not practice what they preach. The starkest example of this is the Syrian refugee crisis. Half of Syria’s 18 million people have been displaced, of whom 5.6 million have found refuge in neighboring countries, in particular Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Europe has done little, resettling minimal numbers, although Germany has taken in more than half a million.
The response to unauthorized migration, and the deaths that come with it, consists of an intensification of the very measures that spurred unauthorized migration. Europe is caught in a policy cycle that ensures demand for smuggling services, as well as making it profitable to supply smuggling at high volume and low quality. The data compiled by Dutch NGO United for Intercultural Action show there are peaks in the number of deaths (which European governments blame on those vicious smugglers) as well as drops (which they claim as policy successes). But the trend is up, and the policy cycle makes it unrealistic to expect that this will change.
Sources: Maritime Security + Guardian
