Britain’s plan to send Channel migrants to Rwanda is a “betrayal of values” and the “politics of cynicism”,  Emmanuel Macron has said.

On Thursday, the French president criticised the controversial Rwanda plan during a flagship speech on the future of Europe at Sorbonne University in Paris.

“I also do not believe in this model that some people want to put in place which means that you go and look for a third country, for example in Africa, and send our immigrants there,” Mr Macron said.

“This is a betrayal of values, and it will just lead us down the path of new dependencies on other third countries.”

His comments came after the Rwanda bill was finally passed in Westminster on Monday night, just hours before five migrants, including a three-year-old girl, drowned in the English Channel.

This week, Rishi Sunak revealed plans to get the first flights taking illegal migrants to Rwanda in the air in the next 10 to 12 weeks. The Prime Minister said this would begin a “drum beat” of multiple flights every month.

French police were criticised for their role in the tragedy after they permitted the flimsy dinghy, crammed with an unprecedented 112 migrants, to leave the Plage des Allemands beach at Wimereux, near Boulogne.

Elsewhere in the speech, Mr Macron warned Europe “can die”, and declared the US was more concerned about “themselves” and China than the Continent.

Mr Macron called on the EU to deepen European defence cooperation in a “paradigm shift” and suggested France’s nuclear arsenal could provide security guarantees to the EU.

Mr Macron said the EU had to punch its geopolitical weight in the world and prove “that it’s never going to be the, say, the lapdog of the United States and know how to speak with all of the other regions of the world.”

“We’re reacting too slowly [...] whichever way you look at it, the United States have two priorities; Themselves. That’s fair enough. And the Chinese matter. Europe is far behind. It’s not a priority for their geopolitical view,” he said at Sorbonne University.

It is not the first time that Mr Macron has attacked Britain over its asylum policy.  Two years ago, when Paris and London were at odds over the small boats issue, he said migrants were attracted to the UK by an “economic model that “depends on illegal work by foreigners”.

Mr Macron was discussing reforms to EU asylum and migration rules when he took a swipe at the Rwanda plan, which has also been strongly criticised by the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner.

France, like the UK, is a member of the non-EU Council of Europe and signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Other European countries, such as Denmark and Germany, are considering the offshore processing of asylum seekers with policies that have some similarities to the Rwanda plan.

Italy has struck a deal with non-EU Albania to host and process migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

The Safety of Rwanda Bill got royal assent on Thursday after the Lords finally dropped its opposition to the legislation designating the country as safe.

But a YouGov poll has revealed only a third of Tory voters believe Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plan will succeed.

On Monday, Home Office figures showed that the number of migrants arriving by small boats across the Channel had increased by 24 per cent to 6,265 in the first four months of this year, compared with 5,049 last year.

The pre-Brexit Dublin Agreement allowed the UK to return migrants to “safe” EU countries where they should have claimed asylum if they had passed through them. This was scrapped under Brexit and has not been replaced.

This week Lord Cameron indicated the reason why Britain can no longer return Channel migrants to France is because of Brexit,

In March last year, Rishi Sunak and Mr Macron agreed a deal to tackle the small boats illegally crossing the Channel.

Under its terms, Britain agreed to pay France about £480 million and fund a detention centre over three years. Paris agreed to increase patrols of its beaches.

At the time, Mr Macron said the UK should try and strike a replacement EU-wide migrant returns deal but that has been ruled out for the foreseeable future by European Commission sources.