Six people traffickers have been found guilty in France of causing the deaths of 31 migrants in the worst ever small-boat accident in the Channel. At the end of a four-week trial in Paris, the six were convicted of "involuntary homicide" and given prison terms of between six and 10 years. Seven others were given lesser sentences of up to four years, and one person was found not guilty.
The boat went down early in the morning on 24 November 2021 after sending distress calls to French and British coastguards. The dead, including a child of seven, were mainly Iraqi Kurds but also included Afghans, Egyptians and Iranian Kurds. The charge sheet said the migrants had been put to sea from the French coast in a boat "that was of poor quality, uncertified, unsuitable for navigation at sea, overloaded, and without correct life jackets".
The trial established that the guilty men were members of two separate networks – one of which was Iraqi Kurd, the other Afghan – that co-operated to organise the cross-channel journey and bring migrants to the meeting point. Unusually the court was attended at the start by several family members, who came to France from Iraqi Kurdistan and gave moving testimony about how the victims came to be on board the boat. Speaking after the verdict, their lawyer Matthieu Chirez said the decision "comes as a relief for all the civil plaintiffs because it confirms the penal responsibility of the traffickers".
He said the trial had "humanised the families of victims". One family member, Zana Marmand Muhammed, told the court how his younger brother Twana had "wanted to go to England to find a job and because the geopolitical situation with us is dangerous. No-one in the family wanted him to leave, but we could not dissuade him." Nabi Mustafa Mina, the father of Zanyar who was 19 when he died, told of how he tried to dissuade his son from leaving.
"I said I would help him to get married, I would give him my house, I would divide my salary in two. But no, he said he wanted a better life, that he would get by somehow. I ran out of arguments," he said.
The family-members explained how they had paid a deposit at a bank in Iraqi Kurdistan and then followed their loved ones' progress through Turkey, Italy and then France. In one of the last messages from Twana, he posted a picture of himself at the Eiffel Tower. The court also heard a statement from one of the two survivors, Issa Omar, read out by his lawyer.
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