Migrant girls, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, attempting to cross into France from Italy are being exploited by would-be smugglers offering to drive them across the on the countries' common Riviera border in exchange for sex acts, says a report by the Italian branch of the charity Save the Children.
A report published by NGO Oxfam says its interviews with migrant children trying to cross from Italy to France on the Riviera border found complaints of being 'physically and verbally abused, and detained overnight in cells without food, water or blankets and with no access to an official guardian', and also claims that some children had the soles of their shoes cut off before being sent back to Italy.
The death toll from the level-crossing collision on Thursday afternoon between a coach carrying secondary school children and a passenger train near Perpignan in southern France has risen five, while six of those injured remained in a critical condition, announced a Marseille public prosecutor late Friday.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics reports that emergency medical treatment of children after their accidental intoxication from marijuana has risen by 133% over the past 11 years in France, the country where consumption of the drug is the highest in Europe.
The French parliament will later this year debate a health ministry proposal to make compulsory the vaccination of young children against 11 different ingectious diseases, only three of which are currently mandatory, but the move divides public opinion of which, opinion surveys show, a large minority consider vaccines unsafe.
The victims, part of a school group from Brittany on a visit to London, were mowed down when the driver of a vehicle mounted a pavement on Westminster Bridge and rammed into pedestrians, killing at least two people and injuring about 20 others.
For several decades, it remained one of the most shameful secrets of post-war France: from 1963 to 1982, more than 2,000 children were deported from the French-governed Indian Ocean island of La Réunion to mainland France in a government programme to repopulate deserted rural areas in the centre of the country. It was only in 2002 that the scandal first came to public attention, beginning a long campaign for justice. That finally resulted in an official commission of enquiry which this week presented its initial findings, when it formally recognised the displaced children’s suffering, including maltreatment and racism. But the victims, a number of whom are now in their 50s and 60s, are still waiting for proper reparation.
More than 2,000 children were removed from the Indian Ocean island between 1963 and 1982 as part of a French government programme to repopulate rural postwar France, where Jean-Thierry Cheyroux, now 56, was sent in 1967 to work on the farm of his adoptive parents.
France's interior minister said ahead of a meeting on Monday with his British counterpart that he was 'solemnly asking Britain to assume its moral duty' to grant asylum to hundreds of children living in the makeshift migrant camp in the French Channel port.
