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France vows ‘no new refugee centre in Calais’ as migrants say conditions are worse than ever

Despite the fact hundreds of refugees and migrants are living in Calais in desperate conditions the French government has vowed there will be no new welcome centre built. Instead security will be reinforced.

Published: 23 June 2017 12:33 CEST
France vows 'no new refugee centre in Calais' as migrants say conditions are worse than ever
Migrants queue for food in Calais. Photo: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron's new government took a tough line on Calais migrants Friday, with his interior
minister saying he does not want the northern port to become an “abscess”.

Making his first visit to a city which has for years been a magnet for migrants and refugees hoping to cross to Britain, Interior Minister Gerard Collomb  (see pic below) ruled out building a reception centre for asylum-seekers in Calais, saying it would only encourage more people to come.

“We've seen this before, it starts with a few hundred people and ends with several thousand people who we can't manage,” Collomb said as he met with security forces, officials and aid workers in Calais.

“That's why we don't want a centre here.”

Instead, Collomb said, “we are going to reinforce security with the arrival of two additional mobile security force units to stop any new camps from forming.”

Authorities shut down the notorious “Jungle” camp in Calais, which at its height was home to some 10,000 people living in dire conditions, last October.

(Interior Minister Gerrard Collomb – centre – meets police in Calais. AFP)

But hundreds of migrants — mostly Afghans, Sudanese and Eritreans — are still at the port, clashing sporadically with police as they try every night to stow away onto trucks heading to Britain.

This week a Polish driver was killed when his truck burst into flames after hitting a roadblock, set up by migrants hoping to slow the traffic to make it easier to jump onto vehicles.

The roadblocks began reappearing in late May with a new uptick of migrants in the region — and a surge for Europe, with Italy registering more than 65,000 arrivals since January.

While the tent city of the Jungle is gone, migrants say conditions in Calais are bleaker than ever.

“There is no tap and we cannot drink, we cannot wash. There is nowhere to sleep. At night I sleep without a tent on the 'mountain',” said Jamal, a 24-year-old Afghan, pointing to a huge rubbish dump.



'They are not dirt'

Collomb pledged Friday to present Macron with a plan for asylum reforms in the next two weeks, vowing in particular to tackle African people-smuggling networks at their root.

Eleven charities went to court on Wednesday demanding the construction of a government refugee centre in Calais, deploring the miserable conditions in which migrants find themselves.

Collomb had angered aid groups with comments Thursday rejecting the proposal, saying that building such a centre would be like creating an artificial festering “abcess” that would keep growing.

“These people are not a disease, they are not dirt. They are men and women who have made a very difficult journey to flee their countries for reasons we all know about,” said Hicham Aly, an aid worker at the Secours Catholique charity.

Collomb argued that past experience showed that any official asylum facility in Calais would quickly overflow with arrivals, leaving authorities unable to cope.

“I'm suspicious of centres that are supposedly ready to welcome migrants for only a few days who end up staying for a long time,” he said.

He pointed to Sangatte near Calais, where a refugee centre that opened in 1999 quickly ran over its capacity of 800 residents. By the time it closed three years later, some 2,000 people were crammed into it.

POLICE

French police cause misery for migrants in Calais

French police are inflicting misery on migrants in the northern port of Calais, routinely tearing down their tents and forcing them to wander the streets as part of a deterrence policy, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report published on Thursday.

Published: 7 October 2021 12:30 CEST
French police cause misery for migrants in Calais
A migrant camp is evacuated by police forces in Calais in February 2019. Photo: Philippe HUGUEN / AFP.

The 75-page report documents methods used by authorities to prevent the emergence of another major migrant settlement in Calais, five years after the demolition of the sprawling “Jungle” camp which housed up to 10,000 people at its peak.

Calais has for years been a rallying point for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa trying to sneak across the English Channel to Britain.

Faced with growing public anti-migrant sentiment, President Emmanuel Macron’s government has waged a campaign to prevent new camps emerging.

Police tactics include systematically tearing down migrants’ tents in the woods, on wasteland or under bridges, regularly confiscating their belongings and harassing NGOs trying to provide them with aid, according to New York-based HRW.

“The authorities carry out these abusive practices with the primary purposes of forcing people to move elsewhere, without resolving their
migration status or lack of housing, or of deterring new arrivals,” it said in the report entitled “Enforced Misery: The Degrading Treatment of Migrant Children and Adults in Northern France”.

‘Harass and abuse’

NGOs estimate the number of migrants currently living around Calais at between 1,500 and 2,000, including numerous families. Local authorities estimate that only 500 remain in the area.

Last week, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin ordered the eviction of a camp housing 400 migrants near a hospital in Calais, which was presented as a danger to the hospital’s patients and staff.

On that occasion the migrants were taken to temporary shelters but often they are left to wander the streets.

“When the police arrive, we have five minutes to get out of the tent before they destroy everything,” a Kurdish woman from Iraq told HRW.

The interior ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on the report.

The government argues that the camps are havens for people smugglers, who command extortionate fees to help migrants cross to Britain, either in a small boat crossing the Channel in the dead of night or stowed away on a truck crossing by ferry or through the Channel Tunnel.

NGOs argue that the tactics do nothing more than make migrants already difficult lives even more miserable.

The report quoted the Calais-based Human Rights Observers group as saying that in some cases cleaning crews cut migrants’ tents while people are still inside, in order to force them out.

“If the aim is to discourage migrants from gathering in northern France, these policies are a manifest failure and result in serious harm,” Benedicte Jeannerod, France director at Human Rights Watch, said.

French authorities “need a new approach to help people, not repeatedly harass and abuse them,” she added.

A total of 15,400 people attempted to cross the Channel in the first eight months of this year, a increase of 50 percent over the figure for the whole of 2020, according to French coast guard statistics.

“Exiles aren’t travelling to northern France because they’ve heard they can camp in the woods or stay under a bridge…They come because that’s where the border is,” Charlotte Kwantes, national coordinator of the Utopia 56 charity was quoted in the report as saying.

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