U.N. offer to 'sort out' Sangatte

Immigrants at the Sangatte holding camp in northern France

LONDON, England -- The United Nations refugee agency has offered to mediate in the deadlock between Britain and France over the controversial Sangatte refugee camp.

The U.N. high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR), former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers, said the agency would be prepared to screen the 1,200 residents of the camp near Calais to assess which were genuine refugees.

He said the "few hundred" who were likely to qualify for refugee status could then be split between Britain and France.

The offer to intervene was made at a meeting with British Home Secretary David Blunkett on Thursday.

"We have said we are available, if Paris and London ask us, to give a hand with the screening of the people at Sangatte. We could do it together," Lubbers told the Guardian newspaper on Saturday.

"Our assessment is that only a limited percentage of the people in Sangatte would prove to be refugees. Then we could come to a very practical arrangement about the limited numbers -- maybe we are talking about a few hundred.

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"Perhaps split them between France and UK and do something."

A Home Office spokesman told the Press Association: "Any deal on Sangatte is a matter for the UK and the French.

"The UNHCR isn't brokering a deal but we welcome their involvement."

Britain wants the camp, which it believes acts as a magnet for illegal immigrants trying to cross through the Channel Tunnel into the UK, closed.

France, however, is insisting that Britain pushes through new asylum legislation before it acts.

Blunkett is scheduled to meet with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris, on Friday to decide the future of Sangatte.

Blunkett will hold talks with his French counterpart next week

Rupert Colville, of the UNHCR, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "We told the French and British governments that if they both agree, we could help them sort out the problem at Sangatte by screening the occupants on the spot in Sangatte instead of waiting for them to make their attempts to cross the Channel and then get them screened."

The "common sense solution would be that if there was a very good reason why they should be in the UK rather than France that could be the direction they go, but if there is no particular reason then maybe they could stay in France," he said.

Sangatte is located near Calais, on the French side of the Channel Tunnel, and the camp is used to house hundreds of asylum seekers.

A converted hangar, the camp is on land owned by Channel Tunnel operator Eurotunnel and was requisitioned in 1999 to house up to 200 people. But the numbers held there have been as high as 1,800.

Eurotunnel says it intercepted about 18,500 refugees trying to enter the tunnel in the first half of 2001 alone.

Last year, six people died trying to sneak through the tunnel, and more than 100 were injured, the French Interior Ministry said.