The young asylum seeker was forced into piloting the boat on which at least four people drowned. Under new ‘stop the boats’ laws, he’s responsible for their deaths – but others say he’s a victim
The young asylum seeker was forced into piloting the boat on which at least four people drowned. Under new ‘stop the boats’ laws, he’s responsible for their deaths – but others say he’s a victim
This is the best summary I could come up with:
His initial journey from Senegal was tough, too, as he travelled to the Gambia, then Mali (where the judge acknowledged he had been subjected to forced labour), Algeria and Libya before crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.
Smugglers don’t drive boats themselves: they either offer the job to someone like Bah, who can’t afford to pay for their passage; force a passenger to steer; or leave it to the group to share the task between them.
The reasons Bah and thousands of others are forced into this particularly deadly form of Russian roulette on the Channel is due to government policy not to provide safe and legal routes for those who are fleeing persecution.
The decisions people make before stepping into a precarious dinghy on a beach in northern France are not a result of nuanced calculations based on the latest law to pass through parliament.
“I come or I die,” one Syrian asylum seeker told me recently, when I asked about his decision to make a high-risk boat crossing after experiencing torture in his home country.
They also point out that Bah had already spent 14 months in prison without knowing how long he would remain there, after a previous trial against him last year collapsed when the jury failed to reach a verdict.“He too is a survivor of the shipwreck he experienced in December 2022,” the statement continues.
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