Paul Alauzy is a coordinator with the French medical care NGO Médecins du monde and acts as the spokesperson for a collective called Le Revers de la médaille (roughly translatable as “The flip side of the medal”) which represents about 100 different associations dedicated to assisting people in situations of social exclusion.
Talking to Mediapart, he explained how he was no longer able to satisfy requests from the media, and notably foreign media, who wanted to report on sites where the homeless and squatters in and around Paris were being evicted, many of them subsequently sent to areas well away from the capital ahead of its hosting of the summer Olympic Games. “The state has carried out so many expulsions, so many dispersals, made things so invisible, that there was nothing more to show,” he said. “We have reached the end of a very strong cycle of expulsions.”
The collective has compiled precise records of the extent of the social “clean-up” operations, based on personal accounts from those targeted, on documented reports, and information provided by local authorities. The result is an 80-page document which it published on June 3rd, entitled “One year of a social clean-up before the JOP [the Olympic and Paralympic games]” and which clearly maps the recent steep increase in the evacuations of sites, including squats and makeshift camps.
The collective has calculated that between April 2023 and May 2024, at least 12,545 people have been evicted from their makeshift accomodation in Paris and the Greater Paris region (Île-de-France), which it said represents a 38.5% increase in such interventions in comparison to the same period between 2021 and 2022. It reports that among that number are 3,434 minors.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The collective reported that at the end of last year, more than 4,000 people in and around Paris were transported to other regions, in part due to a reduction in the amount of emergency accommodation available in hotels in the capital as they seek to rent out rooms for the games.
According to a report by public radio FranceInfo, citing official prefectural documents, more than 5,224 people have been moved from Paris and its surrounding region to emergency accommodation in other French regions since April 2023. The number includes 3,958 displacements during the whole of last year, and 1,266 since the beginning of 2024.
For the collective Le Revers de la médaille, this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic games (to be held, respectively, between July 26th and August 11th, and August 28th and September 8th) have acted as “an accelerator” of the government’s continually repressive policies towards migrant and homeless populations. Moreover, the collective adds that previous Olympic Games held elsewhere in the world, and notably the 2010 winter games in Vancouver, witnessed similar clean-up operations.
The collective argued that the extent of what it called “the harassment of populations which live alongside sites hosting the Olympiads” is evidence that many of the evictions are directly linked to concerns over the public image projected during the games, contrary to the denials of the authorities.
The phenomenon is not limited to Paris. In the city of Bordeaux, in south-west France, a shantytown housing around 500 people, close to the Matmut Atlantique stadium where certain Olympic football matches are to be played, has been dismantled. “The preparation of the JOP [Olympic and Paralympic games] obliges us to ensure a high level of security and, in order to do this, there are a certain number of security perimeters that had to be established around the Matmut stadium,” said an official from the prefecture of the Gironde département (county), in which Bordeaux lies.
Ten sites in Paris and its surrounding area, occupied by a total of 1,967 squatters, have been evacuated since April 2023. “In the absence of the possibility of obtaining institutional accommodation, these occupations [squats] represent, however, rare alternatives to camp sites and living in the street,” noted the report.
The collective also underlined that the authorities in the Paris region have turned to using urgent decree procedures for evacuations instead of administrative orders that might require approval by courts. It said that eight such measures were issued by prefectures to evacuate occupied sites in public spaces between February and May this year, whereas just two were issued over the period between May 2021 and January 2024.
“Sometimes, an imminent peril is cited whereas people have been [living] in the sites for several months and thet had never been raised before,” said Théodore Malgrain, a programme coordinator with the association Barreau de Paris Solidarité, which is part of the collective and provides free legal aid to those in situations of social exclusion. He gave the example of a shantytown close to railway tracks in the north Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec. It was evacuated in February on the order of a decree issued by the local municipal authorities who cited “the urgent need to preserve the regularity of trains, notably at the very particular period of the forthcoming Olympic and Paralympic games”.
Unaccompanied minors are also among those targeted by the operations. The Revers de la médaille report cited the evacuation, also in February, of a rough camp set up by minors on a quayside of the River Seine in Paris, which was carried out on an informal order by the Paris prefecture and without the approval of the Paris town hall. “A totally illegal expulsion,” noted the report, and which therefore did not include the normally required offer of alternative shelter. “These people are displaced from makeshift camp to makeshift camp, with no social diagnostic made beforehand nor proposition adapted to their situation,” said Aurélia Huot, a lawyer and now full-time legal aid organiser with the Barreau de Paris Solidarité.
The crackdown has also targeted sex workers in what the collective described as police operations marked by “a high level of violence and abuse”. It has recorded accounts of insults, forced extractions from vehicles, and incidents where women prostitutes were not given time to put their clothes back on. The report recorded 20 such operations between the beginning of June 2023 and the end of March 2024, in which 203 people had been subjected to police controls. That resulted in 44 of them (31 women and 13 men) being placed in administrative detention centres, while 37 others were issued with orders to leave France.
Aurélia Huot said that until about one year ago, the police showed greater tolerance towards prostitutes. “They were regarded as victims rather than foreigners, now it’s the opposite,” she said. “There are lots of women whose trace has been lost, because they were taken to administrative detention centres or because they no longer come to see the associations which help them. Note that we accompany victims of slavery in their process of getting out of prostitution or the trafficking networks.”
As part of a national crackdown on drug trafficking launched in January, there are regularly renewed bans issued by the prefecture on gatherings of drug users in the capital. “That has very negative impacts on these people, who are evermore obliged to travel far, to hide and to avoid places where they could be controlled,” said Théodore Malgrain.
In conclusion, the collective calls for thorough social planning ahead of any evictions, and the creation, at a national level, of extra emergency accommodation for 20,000 people, including for 7,000 in Paris and its surrounding region along with the establishment of a permanent first-stop centre to provide for the needs of homeless migrants in the capital.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.