French agree to close Sangatte refugee camp within 9 months

The Sangatte refugee camp near Calais, which has poisoned Anglo-French relations for three years, will close by the end of March, the British and French governments agreed yesterday.

If the British Government makes rapid progress with its tough new legislation to discourage illegal immigration, the Red Cross camp near the mouth of the Channel Tunnel may be cleared of its 1,300 residents by the end of this year.

A provisional timetable for the closure of the camp – which its critics say has acted as a springboard for illegal migration to Britain – was agreed by the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, in talks in Paris.

The French government agreed that the camp would close within three to six months of the enactment of Mr Blunkett's proposed laws to discourage asylum-seekers with unfounded claims from trying to enter Britain. The two men will meet again in September at the Frethun cross-Channel freight yard near Calais to finalise the timetable for closure. In the meantime, the French government has accepted an offer from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to organise voluntary repatriation of Afghan inmates, who make up more than half of the migrants in the camp. If they refuse aid to go home, Mr Sarkozy hinted, they may be expelled.

The fate of the remaining immigrants in the camp, many of them Iraqi Kurds, is unclear. Contrary to earlier reports, Paris has not demanded that Britain take a proportion of the refugees as the political price for closing the camp.