Detailed accounts of a holding camp in northern France, where hundreds of vulnerable Vietnamese young people are housed every year before being smuggled into exploitation in the UK, have prompted anti-trafficking charities to call on the British and French governments to disrupt the criminal networks running the site, reports The Guardian.
Hidden in woodland, on the site of an old coalmine, the well-organised camp known as Vietnam City is usually home to between 40 and 100 Vietnamese migrants, some of them minors, who are on their way to the UK to work illegally in cannabis farms, nail bars and restaurants, according to charity workers who recently visited. New, previously unpublished photos from the camp show squalid living conditions, with residents cooking and sleeping in unsafe conditions in a derelict coalminers’ barracks, with a collapsed roof and no heating.
The site, about 60 miles (100km) south-east of Calais, has been chosen by traffickers because of its proximity to a service station on the motorway where lorry drivers stop to rest, before travelling to the ferry port to cross to England. There is less security here than at the port, so it is easier to smuggle people into vehicles.
Although the site is understood to have existed for over a decade, hidden in plain sight at the edge of the town of Angres, there has been little concerted effort to close it by the French police and no effective work done by British authorities to address the smuggling of Vietnamese people through France.
A group of local residents, the Collectif Fraternité Migrants, pays for wood for the stove and has installed a generator in the camp, and food donations are delivered once or twice a week. The local government has supplied cold running water, and a French medical charity makes weekly visits to the site.
The issue of trafficking and exploitation of Vietnamese people in cannabis farms and nail bars in the UK is the subject of a report from the UK’s anti-slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland, due to be published on Monday. However there is growing frustration from charities working to protect Vietnamese people trafficked into the UK that so little has been done to stop the trade in vulnerable people from impoverished rural parts of Vietnam.
In recent years police have repeatedly raided cannabis farms across the UK, staffed by Vietnamese young people. Earlier this year a former nuclear bunker in Wiltshire was found to have been converted into a cannabis farm on an industrial scale, with four Vietnamese workers locked inside.