Safe Passage UK, a programme powered by Citizens UK, is working to establish safe legal routes for unaccompanied refugee children in Calais.  

The camp in Calais is no place for children, and all reports indicate that its destruction is imminent.  With no safe place to go to, already vulnerable children will be fleeing for their lives when the bulldozers
roll in. After the last eviction more than 100 children went ‘missing’. We are working to ensure the UK government brings those that qualify for sanctuary in the UK here before the demolition begins.  

Without access to safe legal routes, children are risking their lives daily, climbing onto speeding trains, into suffocating lorries or driven into the hands of traffickers in attempt to reach safety just 40 miles away in the UK. No child should die trying to reach sanctuary in the UK.

Due to the impending demolition of the camp, we are no longer fundraising for individual children’s casework. Our work will now focus
on encouraging the UK government to offer sanctuary to as many vulnerable children as possible before the demolition begins.

With the help of social workers, NGOs and local authorities, we will be setting up a system to demonstrate to the government how they can identify the most vulnerable children in Calais, and bring them to safety in the UK. Once we have shown the authorities how this system can work, we hope that they will take over.

The set-up costs for this system will be high. We will need help finding the most vulnerable children in camp, we will need to bring qualified social workers to Calais to work with the children, we will need translators (lots of them), we need a venue, we need to organise transport.

We hope that you will help us fund this important work. It is the best chance we have of getting as many vulnerable children out of the
Calais camp as possible before the demolition begins.

If we are fortunate enough to raise more than we need, your donation will be used to support Safe Passage UK’s ongoing work with refugees in Greece, Italy and Northern France.

Safe Passage UK is a consortium of partners, pro-bono lawyers, volunteers, interpreters, and field staff.

The Safe Passage UK programme is a 2016 recipient of the
European Citizens Prize: Honouring Exceptional Europeans.

Visit our website: http://safepassage.org.uk

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/safepassageuk

Watch a video: https://vimeo.com/152158988

Images by Lucy Mohr, Lilian Simonsson and Roxanne Courtenay