A charity operating in the Calais refugee camp is threatening to launch legal action against the British government unless it intervenes in the cases of 30 of the most vulnerable children stranded there.

Citizens UK, which is working with the Home Office on the current Calais operation, says the current programme, which has seen 39 boys and young adults brought to the country this week, is slow and one-dimensional.

It says the Home Office programme is totally ignoring a group of 500 or more unaccompanied children, some as young as eight and many of them girls, because they do not have a relative in the UK.

This is despite the Dubs amendment to the immigration bill, passed in May, which meant Britain agreeing to offer sanctuary to some of the most vulnerable unaccompanied child refugees in Europe.

“The government has still not set up a system to assess their best interests and transfer these children, who include 38 girls from the Calais camp. Zero children have been transferred to date under the amendment’s terms,” the charity said in a statement.

George Gabriel, community organiser with Citizens UK, said: “There are over 1,200 children in the middle of a muddy, freezing field surrounded by 10,000 adults they do not know. The idea that as a country we cannot successfully reunite the small number eligible with their families is ridiculous.

“The real problem here is that the provisions introduced specifically to protect the very youngest and most vulnerable children under the Dubs amendment have never been acted on.”

However, it is understood the Home Office is stepping up its efforts given the impending demolition of the camp.

Fr Michael Scanlon, a priest at St Mary’s Catholic church in Croydon who is working with Citizens UK in Britain, said he understood the Home Office was going to bring in 15 or 16 children on Thursday, but as many as “40,50 or 60” on Friday.

He said he was led to believe the Home Office was also planning to open its Lunar House processing centre on Saturday and Sunday.

Citizens UK said in a statement on Wednesday that unless the Home Office acted by Thursday it would launch action in the high court using section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016.

The Foreign Office has warned of disruption around Calais, with the French authorities expected to begin demolishing the refugee camp.

The camp, which is home to about 10,000 immigrants and refugees, is expected to be closed and demolished in the coming days after a French court rejected an appeal from aid groups to delay the clearance.

New travel advice issued on Wednesday warned Britons of disruption in the area for several days.

It said: “The French government has declared its intention to clear the migrant camp in Calais imminently. Although the French government has plans in place to manage disruption, there remains a possibility that those travelling to Calais port may experience some delays during the clearance, which is expected to last several days.”

Lord Dubs, the man behind the amendment, said it was “vital that the UK lives up to its promise”.

He added: “With reports that the demolition is just days away the government needs to act quickly.”

A Home Office minister, Susan Williams, told the House of Lords on Wednesday that the priority was children who had family in the UK.

“We will transfer as many as children who qualify under the Dublin regulation before the start of the clearance. We will start to transfer other unaccompanied children under section 67 of the Immigration Act in the coming weeks,” said Lady Williams.

She said there were an estimated 1,300 children in Calais, a third of whom were eligible to come under the Dubs amendment or the Dublin regulation.

She confirmed there were 14 children transferred to London on Monday, 13 on Tuesday and 12 on Wednesday.

Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

Frontline workers in Calais on Wednesday said they were alarmed the Home Office was moving so slowly to rescue the children in the camp.



This week, with the clock ticking after the French declaration that the camp will be demolished, the Home Office has speeded up the process.

But at the current rate of taking 12 to 14 children a day, about 1,000 will be left to the mercy of the elements if the bulldozers arrive on Monday.

“They are the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable and we have no idea what is going to happen to them. Many of them are girls,” said Mary Jones, who ran the Jungle Books charity in the camp until it was closed by the French authorities.

“There was clearly a will at government level to help because they accepted the Dubs amendment but they are not doing anything about it. We have got all these vulnerable children and we don’t know what to say to them,” said Jones.

Josie Naughton, founder of Help Refugees, one of the biggest charities in the camp, said nobody knew what would happen to the children when the bulldozers arrived.

Its last census in September established there were 1,022 children in the camp, of whom just 187 qualified to come to Britain under the Dublin regulation, which allows minors seeking asylum to be fast-tracked to another EU country if they have a relative there.

Most of these are teenage boys and young adults, which explains why the three busloads of migrants rescued from Calais this week were all male.

With time running out and winter approaching, Citizens UK has now taken matters into its own hands and set up a system of processing the children.

It handed the Home Office details of 30 “fully assessed children” and gave the department 48 hours to respond before it faced action on behalf of each child.

It has identified three local authorities, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Hounslow in London, who say they can provide care and accommodation for all 30.

One of the children is a 16-year-old girl from Eritrea. She described life in the camp in Calais as “a war”. She said it was very scary and noisy at night from the sound of the nearby trees and people. She spent most nights trying to get on passing lorries. She was particularly distressed after she witnessed an Eritrean man get hit and killed by a lorry last week.