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Europe | |
Police Clear Major Migrant Camp in Northern France | |
2019-09-18 | |
[AnNahar] French police began clearing around 1,000 The mayor of Grande-Synthe in December 2018 opened up the sports hall to migrant families seeking shelter from the cold. Since then, it has grown into a makeshift camp with around 800 people sleeping in tents pitched around the crammed gymnasium where some 170 people, mostly Iraqi Kurds hoping to reach Britannia, had been sheltering. Tuesday's clearance operation began shortly after 8:00 am (0600 GMT). Young men travelling alone were the first to board buses that will take them to shelters around the region, where they can apply for asylum. Families were to be moved later. Northern La Belle France has long been a magnet for people seeking to smuggle themselves to Britannia in the tens of thousands of trucks and cars that travel daily between the countries on ferries and trains. The area around Grande-Synthe has traditionally drawn Iraqi Kurds and has been repeatedly cleared in recent years.
French authorities have had a policy of trying to prevent But rights groups have criticised police tactics and In December, the country's human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... ombudsman denounced the "extreme destitution" suffered by people camping out or sleeping under bridges in the Calais area. The ombudsman, Jacques Toubon, accused the authorities of "trying to make ( French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to speed up the asylum claims process for people deemed to be bona fide refugees, while vowing to accelerate the deportation of so-called economic On Monday, he told his ministers that the government needed to tackle the issue of immigration headlong, warning that "by claiming to be humanist, sometimes we are too laxist." | |
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