Police violence 'rarely punished' at France and Belgium border to UK

by Maël Galisson

Mawda Shawri was two years old when she was killed by Belgian police. She was shot in the head during a car chase involving police in May 2018. The incident made headlines and a trial followed. But her family never really got justice.

"Police violence is very rarely punished," said Selma Benkhelifa, the Brussels lawyer who represented Shawri's family. "And when it is, the sentences are often very low."

Shawri is one of 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.

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Some of those migrants have died as a direct result of police violence, as in Shawri's case. Others have died from the at times lethal conditions created by heavy policing, like being denied access to medical care. And, because hostile law enforcement creates a climate of fear, still others have died while trying to avoid the police.

Such violence is rarely called into question, let alone checked.

A deadly car chase

Shawri's parents fled Iraqi Kurdistan with their eldest son in 2015. They made it to England, where they applied for asylum, but rather than hearing their case the British government sent them back to Germany. This was possible under EU law – which the UK was subject to at the time – because the German authorities had fingerprinted the family at an earlier stage of their journey.

Shawri was born there while her parents waited for their claim to be processed. It was rejected. So, with no prospects in Germany, the family tried once again to reach the UK in April 2018.

"As people were no longer able to cross into England via Calais, from 2017 onwards, they started trying to cross via Belgium, via the rest areas on Belgian freeways," Benkhelifa said.

In response, the local authorities launched Operation Medusa to deter migrants and arrest smugglers.

According to Benkhelifa's account, on the night of the incident Shawri and her family boarded a van with fake number plates. Three men with covered faces sat in front. Police spotted the vehicle, and during pursuit a police officer opened fire on the van. Shawri was hit in the head and died of her injuries.

The police officer responsible for Shawri's death was given a one-year suspended prison sentence. At the same trial, the van driver was sentenced to four years in prison for failing to stop. "It's totally disproportionate," Benkhelifa said. "When someone dies from a bullet to the head, it's the fault of the person who fired the shot. Not the fault of another person."

The consequences of hostility

Police forces in Calais and the surrounding areas have been a factor in other migrant deaths over the years, but the connection is rarely as direct as it was in Shawri's case. More often it's fear of the police – and what an encounter with law enforcement might mean for their future – that leads to migrants being killed.

Migrants die running from the cops. To name just a few:

In 2007, Luwam Beyene, a 19-year-old Eritrean woman, and Ali Briar, and 18-year-old from Iraqi Kurdistan, were struck by cars in separate incidents on the A16 freeway while trying to escape police.

Dalir Zarifi, a 24-year-old Afghan, drowned in the moat of the Calais Citadel, right in the centre of town, following a chase with border police in 2011. Noureddine Mohamed, a 28-year-old from Sudan, drowned in the same water one year later after an altercation with the police.

And in 2018, Mohammed, a 40-year-old Ethiopian died while trying to flee a police operation on the E40 freeway in Jabbeke, Belgium. He was hit by a vehicle. The Belgian interior minister at the time, Jan Jambon, described it as a "regrettable incident".

There have been others since.

Sometimes police hostility toward migrants takes the form of negligence, when not outright malice. This can be just as lethal as a car crash.

On the night of 1 September 2020, Rupak Sharif and Ibrahim Hazhar, a couple from Iraqi Kurdistan, were intercepted by the gendarmerie on a beach near Calais. They and other migrants were about to attempt to cross the Channel.

After stopping them from boarding a dinghy, the police decided to keep the migrants where they were. It was cold, dark, and in that moment Sharif's waters broke. She said she alerted the police to the situation, but they told her she had to wait.

"My clothes were wet and bloodstained and I was showing them that, but they wouldn't let us leave to go to hospital," Sharif later told a reporter, "It felt like they were trying to punish us and make an example of us so nobody would try it again."

Hazhar added: "[The officer] was ignoring what was happening to my wife. This wasn't the first time French police had arrested us by the sea, but they had never behaved the way they did that night."

In the early hours of the morning the patrol left, leaving the migrants where they sat. Sharif eventually made it to Calais Hospital, where the nursing staff performed an emergency delivery. Aleksandra was born on 2 September with severe perinatal anoxia – a lack of oxygen to the organs. She was declared dead three days later.

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Traumatised, Aleksandra's parents did something migrants in their situation rarely do. They filed a complaint, triggering an investigation by the General Inspectorate of the National Gendarmerie. Almost three years later, its conclusions have still not been made public.

A campaign of harassment

Violence involving police isn't just a problem when someone ends up dead, but non-lethal violence is even less likely to be punished.

Take the night of 22 August 2022, as recounted by Lucie, a member of Human Rights Observers (HRO). The events, she said, took place at a Total service station in a rest area near Calais, where some migrants had gone to try to get into a truck.

"Two Eritrean people were surrounded by Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (a part of the French National Police), who then took them to an area outside the scope of the petrol station's surveillance cameras," Lucie said. "There, the police officers punched them in the face. The two people fell to the ground and the CRS continued to beat them on the ground."

A team from the migrant support association Utopia 56 reached them while one of the victims was still on the ground, his face bloody. They told the activists that the police had left "laughing".

Stories like this are 12 a penny for Lucie: "We know it's happening. We hear about it. But it's impossible to document it all," she said.

This is as true for encampments as it is for crossing points.

"When we observe the evictions from the camps, we witness verbal violence by the police, sometimes physical violence, and even the theft of belongings belonging to migrants," Lucie explained. "They are also confronted with other types of police violence outside of evictions. But those are much more complicated to document, especially as there are fewer witnesses."

Her colleague Manon said tents, sleeping bags and water cans are regularly sprayed with tear gas. Shelters are also lacerated with cutters or knives. But, unlike Aleksandra's parents, who were so traumatised by losing their baby that they spoke up, migrants usually suffer this abuse in silence.

"Most often, migrant victims of violence do not want to file a complaint," Lucie said. "They know they're just passing through, they're afraid to give their identity, and they don't trust law enforcement. They understand that filing a complaint goes through the police or the public prosecutor."

Migrant solidarity organisations like HRO try to take matters up with authorities, but it rarely results in consequences for law enforcement. Following the violence near the Total station, HRO reported the incident to the public prosecutor. The general inspectorate of the national police launched an investigation, but the case was dismissed.

This doesn't surprise Lucie, who has become used to cases being thrown out because "there were no facts that constituted sufficient violence."

Unacknowledged, but accepted

Yet there is plenty of evidence that such violence is a regular occurrence. HRO publishes monthly digests of what they've observed during evictions, and the international NGO Human Rights Watch produced reports on violence against migrants in the Calais region in 2015, 2017 and 2021. The last of these, "Enforced Misery: The Degrading Treatment of Migrant Children and Adults in Northern France", is 81 pages of documentation regarding evictions, harassment, and restrictions to support.

The défenseur des droits (defender of rights), an independent office within the French government, has also repeatedly raised this issue. Yet its entreaties have also been largely ignored.

In 2012, Dominique Baudis, the defender of rights at the time, pointed to"repeated visits [by police] to living areas, at all hours of the day and night, as well as the existence of individual behaviour aimed at provoking or humiliating migrants".

He also noted "destruction of humanitarian donations and personal belongings", and "expulsions of migrants from their shelters carried out outside any legal framework". He recommended "that these practices be stopped and that the police hierarchy, which cannot ignore them, pay particular attention to them".

Three years later, his successor, Jacques Toubon, said he "deplores the fact that the violence described in his 2012 report has not disappeared", and pointed out that these acts of violence have been denounced by the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights and by the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

Successive ministers of the interior have given similar responses to these allegations. In 2013, Manuel Valls said the defender of rights' criticisms "are essentially based on unverifiable statements concerning old facts." Two years later, Bernard Cazeneuve said "Human Rights Watch did not take the trouble to verify the allegations of police violence it had made." And in 2017, Gérard Collomb deemed accusations of violence "completely excessive." The years go by, the denouncers change, but the Ministry of the Interior defends police action around Calais with the same ardour.

Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister since 2020, has stayed true to this course.

In November 2022, the French state was found liable for the injuries suffered by Janan, an Afghan migrant who was injured by a blast ball (similar to a stun grenade) in June 2016 on the Calais port ring road. The complaint was dismissed after investigation by the French National Police, but an administrative court later ruled against them.

Janan remains mutilated for life.

Lucie and Manon are pseudonyms to protect these human rights observers.

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