France relocates remaining children from ‘Jungle’ camp

THE last group of unaccompanied minors boarded buses to leave the former “Jungle” migrant camp in the northern French port of Calais for shelters across France yesterday.

The last of 38 buses departed in the late afternoon from a park of shipping containers where a total of 1 616 young people had been housed for the past week.

The minors were taken to 60 centres spread throughout the country.

The dismantling of the informal part of the camp that once housed up to 10 000 migrants, most of whom hoped to reach Britain, was completed on Monday night.

More than 4 000 adults who had been living in tents and shacks – mainly Afghans, Eritreans and Sudanese – were moved to reception centres across France last week, before the bulldozers moved in.

That left more than 1 600 underage migrants, who stayed behind in a secure container park run by an NGO, and about 400 women and children living in a separate care facility a few hundred metres away.

The plight of the unaccompanied children has been the subject of testy exchanges between France and Britain.

France is hoping that Britain will take in most of the unaccompanied minors who travelled alone across the Mediterranean in the hope of stowing away on trucks crossing the Channel to England.

Last month, Britain speeded up the transfer of child refugees.

In the past two weeks it has taken in about 300 children with family or contacts across the Channel and promised to take hundreds more.

On Tuesday, President Francois Hollande vowed there would be no new settlement on the site of the Jungle. – AFP