14 July, 2024
Ahead of the Paris Olympics, the French government is driving homeless migrants out of the city. The initial ‘relocation plan’ — a voluntary programme intended to alleviate Paris’s emergency housing shortage — is now being seen as controversial as people are put on buses and asked to leave the city, with some even facing threats of deportation. It has been criticised by many who describe it as a form of “social cleansing”.
The Olympic Village, constructed in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs — home to the highest percentage of immigrants — has become a focal point for these actions. Thousands of people live there in street encampments, shelters, or abandoned buildings.
Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris, The New York Times reported. They have been allotted temporary shelters after which they are screened for asylum and some are given deportation orders. While Paris does not have permanent shelters for the homeless, the migration issue has been a long-standing one in election manifestos.
Critics argue that these measures are more about optics than addressing the root causes of homelessness and poverty. A representative of Doctors of the World, an international humanitarian organisation, told The Guardian that this was being done for Paris to “appear in the most flattering light possible” by “hiding the misery under the rug”. This approach has been condemned by over 60 French organisations as merely pushing the problem out of sight without providing sustainable solutions, euronews reported.
theprint.in
Ahead of the Paris Olympics, the French government is driving homeless migrants out of the city. The initial ‘relocation plan’ — a voluntary programme intended to alleviate Paris’s emergency housing shortage — is now being seen as controversial as people are put on buses and asked to leave the city, with some even facing threats of deportation. It has been criticised by many who describe it as a form of “social cleansing”.
The Olympic Village, constructed in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs — home to the highest percentage of immigrants — has become a focal point for these actions. Thousands of people live there in street encampments, shelters, or abandoned buildings.
Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris, The New York Times reported. They have been allotted temporary shelters after which they are screened for asylum and some are given deportation orders. While Paris does not have permanent shelters for the homeless, the migration issue has been a long-standing one in election manifestos.
Critics argue that these measures are more about optics than addressing the root causes of homelessness and poverty. A representative of Doctors of the World, an international humanitarian organisation, told The Guardian that this was being done for Paris to “appear in the most flattering light possible” by “hiding the misery under the rug”. This approach has been condemned by over 60 French organisations as merely pushing the problem out of sight without providing sustainable solutions, euronews reported.
France’s ‘social cleansing’ of the homeless ahead of Olympics & other global news you may have missed
ThePrint’s round-up of world news and topical issues over the past week.
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