France intends to bulldoze half of the makeshift 'Jungle' camp in Calais and authorities have given one week’s warning to between 800 and 1,000 migrants and refugees to leave a seven-hectare southern section of the site reports The Guardian.
The Calais prefect, Fabienne Buccio, told Le Monde she intended to reduce the size of the camp by about half.
“The time has come to move on, no one must live in the southern part of the camp, everyone must leave this section,” she told Agence France-Presse, estimating that some 800 to 1,000 people would be affected.
Buccio said she and her staff would offer those leaving the camp a place in an alternative, purpose-built facility created using converted shipping containers. Alternatively, they could be helped to leave and travel to other accommodation centres in France.
Buccio told Le Monde 750 extra places in the containers would be offered from this weekend and further places would be found at centres across France.
About 4,000 people are living in squalid conditions in the Jungle as asylum seekers use it as a base from which they attempt to enter Britain via the Channel Tunnel.
The camp sprang up in April last year as a state-sanctioned shanty town – an area of wasteland on a former rubbish tip where migrants living across Calais were deliberately directed by French police while their other squats and camps around the town were destroyed. At that time, the refugees and migrants concentrated on the site were promised access to showers and a daily meal at a nearby repurposed activity centre and told they would be “tolerated” on that scrap of wasteland, which charities complained was insalubrious and presented serious health risks.
But now, amid political rows about the size, conditions and permanency of the makeshift camp, the French authorities aim to reduce the Jungle in size.
Read more of this report from The Guardian.
See also:
The shameful container camp for Calais migrants
The controversial new strategy to draw migrants out of Calais 'jungle'