In all honesty, I didn’t think it through and I should have done.
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“What I did was stupid, I was emotionally exhausted”.
Rob Lawrie, 49, appeared in court in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, northern France, on Tuesday on charges of aiding and abetting illegal immigration. He will not have to pay the fine unless he commits another offence in France.
The court heard how Mr Lawrie, who has bipolar disorder and Tourettes, was raised in a children’s home and had attempted suicide three times, most recently in November, following his prosecution and the family breakdown.
The prosecutor at the hearing had recommended Lawrie be sentenced for breaking migration law, or if acquitted for that, be charged with child endangerment and given a 1,000 euro fine as she was in the back of his van with no seatbelt.
The girl’s father had hoped she could be smuggled out of the the migrants’ camp at Calais.
He was arrested in Calais in October when border police with sniffer dogs found two Eritreans in his van, whom he said had sneaked in without his knowledge.
Earlier on Thursday, Lawrie told reporters he had acted on the spur of the moment. “Compassion won”, Lawrie posted on a Facebook page set up to support him ahead of his court appearance.
More than 50,000 people have signed an online petition to the French authorities appealing for clemency.
Lawrie’s lawyer, Lucile Abassade, demanded the release of her client and called for “leniency” of the court.
He said of his actions: “It was an irrational decision”.
Lawrie is among hundreds of volunteers helping migrants amid a surge of people fleeing the war in Syria, violence in Afghanistan or poverty in Africa.
Britain and France have jointly tightened security around the harbour and railway lines over the past months, but the camp remains.
As winter deepens, tensions have risen in the camp with its residents defying efforts to move about 500-700 of them into metal shipping containers fitted out with heaters and electrical sockets and containing cots for babies.
Lawrie had visited the sprawling camp several times to build shelters for its thousands of residents living there in squalor and desperate to reach Britain.
“We have somehow changed the perception of young men trying to get onto trucks and trains, and getting killed in the meantime, and showing the human side of children suffering in refugee camps”.
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Officials insist the system is simply a way of increasing security and deny they are trying to restrict the migrants’ movements. “They are anxious it will be harder to do that from the containers because they look like a prison”.
