Anne Hidalgo says current situation, with makeshift migrant settlements springing up before being cleared, is not acceptable

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has said the first official refugee camp in the French capital should open within weeks to accommodate “several hundred” homeless asylum seekers.

Hidalgo told a press conference that the humanitarian-standard camp, in the north of the city, would operate with the help of recognised charities and satisfy all relevant United Nations requirements.

“We have identified several city-owned sites and are assessing them to see in what timeframe – as soon as possible – we can create a centre that conforms with UN and HCR conditions,” the Socialist mayor said, adding she expected the camp to open “in the next four to six weeks”.

“I hope it will provide both a welcome centre, to evaluate these people’s situations, and also a site that allows the accommodation of those arriving who have nothing,” she said.

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Hidalgo said the current situation was “no longer tenable”, pointing to the example of a makeshift camp that had sprung up in the north of Paris in the past few days where 800 people are now living.

Whether as transit hubs or final destinations, cities across the continent are increasingly being affected by Europe’s greatest refugee crisis since the second world war, facing challenges that are logistical, administrative, social, cultural and – with anti-immigrant sentiment rising – political.

Improvised camps in parks, gardens and stations or under railway lines have become a common – if often short-lived – sight in several European capitals, including Brussels, Budapest and Paris. More permanent, state-run camps have been built in others including Athens, Vienna and Stockholm.

A report earlier this year by the EuroCities group surveying 34 European urban centres found that from Genoa to Gothenburg and Mannheim to Zagreb, city halls are now having to manage two parallel but distinct problems.

The first is to provide an immediate response: beds, food, clothes, sometimes medical care. The second, longer term but perhaps even more demanding, involved the asylum procedure, permanent housing, education and eventually, integration.

Most makeshift camps and settlements in Paris have been swiftly cleared by authorities on health grounds and their residents moved to reception centres elsewhere in France.



The new facility, to be built of modular cabins, will be the first to open with city hall’s backing. Hidalgo said it was inspired by the camp opened in February at Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk, by the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, to house some 2,500 refugees and migrants, including many from the partly dismantled “Jungle” settlement outside Calais.

“Today, Europe is not facing up to the humanitarian crisis of these refugees. Nor is our own country,” Hidalgo said, adding that the city would be hoping for government help in building and running the camp.

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“Paris will not stand by and do nothing as the Mediterranean becomes a graveyard of refugees,” the mayor said. She promised to provide more information on the site’s precise location in the next few days.

Earlier this month, police cleared a camp of some 1,600 people living in tents under an elevated section of Stalingrad Métro station. Since the beginning of 2015, 8,000 migrants have been given shelter in Paris, with the help of local associations and the regional authority, the mayor’s office said.

Most unofficial camps in Paris – including squats in buildings such as abandoned schools – are in northern Paris near the Gare du Nord station, from where migrants aim to travel north, some to the Channel in hopes of reaching Britain.

Plans for another official refugee centre, due to house 200 destitute migrants later this summer in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, have drawn strong local opposition, with more than 50,000 people signing a petition against it.

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The arrondissement’s centre-right mayor, Claude Goasguen, told Le Monde that at least 30 lawyers had been hired by residents’ groups to oppose the planning application submitted last October for the two-storey, timber-built centre.

Hidalgo’s announcement came as refugees and migrants continued to attempt the dangerous Mediterranean crossing from Africa to Europe following the effective closure of the shorter Aegean Sea route from Turkey to Greece by the controversial EU deal with Ankara.

Flavio di Giacomo, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spokesman, said that based on accounts from survivors who were saved at sea or landed in Italy in recent days, the death toll from migrant vessels capsizing and sinking in the Mediterranean last week had been revised upwards from 700 to 1,000.

Di Giacomo tweeted that 2,400 migrants had lost their lives in sea crossings since January. The number of arrivals was the same as in January-May last year, he said, but the death toll had risen by 34%.