Watch: Farage Again Catches French Ships Escorting Illegal Migrant Boats Into British Waters

Farage Boat Migrants
Nigel Farage Facebook
Kurt Zindulka

Nigel Farage has filmed more migrants apparently being escorted by a French naval vessel into British waters to be handed over to UK Border Force.

The Brexit Party leader turned investigative journalist took to the English Channel again on Tuesday morning to report on the increased waves of illegal boat migrants sailing from camps in France to the United Kingdom.

Mr Farage said that he witnessed a French ship escorting a “rib” (a small rubber boat) loaded with 13 illegal migrants into British waters. In the video, the veteran Brexit campaigner called the actions of the French Navy an “outrage” that “has to stop”.

“Last week, we put huge pressure on the home secretary. We’ve given the French 61 million quid to stop illegal boat migrants coming into British waters. What we witnessed again today, was the navy, the French navy, escorting them into our waters,” Farage said.

Watch: Nigel Farage is all at sea 

On May 20th, Mr Farage previously filmed what he described as an “absolutely packed” rubber dinghy of illegal migrants being brought across the English Channel by a French naval vessel.

Breitbart London reported last week that publicly-available GPS data from the French ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) showed that the vessel had indeed travelled into British waters before rendezvousing with a British border force ship– rather than safely returning the migrants to France. The data further confirmed another trip by the same French ship the week before, when it escorted another migrant boat to within four and a half miles of the English coast.

On Tuesday, Mr Farage said that the French vessels have their “transponders turned off to avoid detection”.

Since the start of the year, some 1,600 illegal migrants have successfully reached British shores, six per cent of whom have been returned to France.

Home secretary Priti Patel has reportedly claimed that the French navy is powerless to stop migrant boats under international maritime laws that prevent the navy from doing anything to prevent the vessels from crossing the Channel unless the migrants request for help.

This justification for inaction by the French and British governments comes in contrast to the Operation Sovereign Borders policy introduced by the Australian government, which has effectively shut down illegal boat migration to the country.

The border policy was introduced seven years ago and has allowed the Australian border force to intercept migrant boats at sea, where they will either be brought back to where they set off from, or be taken to off-shore asylum processing centres in third countries.

The former chief of the Australian border force, Roman Quaedvlieg, has reportedly been advising the UK’s immigration minister, Chris Phillip, on how Britain might resolve the issue.

“The problem is that under your current law, you can’t turn them back and UK immigration policy is such that if they are close enough to UK territorial waters, you have to take them, process them and/or resettle them,” Quaedvlieg told The Telegraph on Monday.

“We had that same legislative challenge in Australia. So what the Conservative Government did — and Priti Patel is thinking about in the UK — was to introduce a maritime powers act,” he added.

“This authorised our border protection minister and the officials from the various agencies to be able to intercept a boat and to make a reasonable determination that it was intending to breach Australian law whether customs, immigration or biosecurity and so turn them around,” Quaedvlieg explained.

Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka

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