French riot police have cleared more than 1,000 migrants and refugees from one of the largest makeshift camps in Paris, where they had been sleeping rough for months in squalid conditions.
Hundreds of homeless people were taken by bus to temporary shelters on Wednesday. Among them were women, children and unaccompanied minors.
More than 2,000 migrants and refugees had been sleeping on pavements under bridges and canals in northern Paris, with scant access to running water, no showers and few temporary toilets, in what doctors and aid groups described as “catastrophic sanitary conditions”.
There has been a scathing political row as the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, accused Emmanuel Macron’s government of failing to provide state help for the large number of people sleeping rough in the capital.
At about 6am, riot police arrived at the largest of the camps, where more than 1,700 people have been sleeping under a motorway bridge along canal Saint-Denis.
Calmly, migrants and refugees boarded buses clutching small bags of belongings, before the tents were destroyed. The interior ministry said people would be housed in temporary shelter while their documents and administrative situation were checked.
Many who had been sleeping rough are from Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, and had made perilous crossings of the Mediterranean after detention and ill-treatment in Libya.
Further camps along the canal and at Porte de la Chapelle, where hundreds more are sleeping on the streets, are expected to be cleared in coming days.
The local prefect’s office said 1,017 people were transferred to temporary shelters, including 64 vulnerable people such as women, children and unaccompanied minors.
Local authorities said the dawn operation was the 35th police eviction of camps in Paris in the past three years. There has been a cycle of tents being evacuated and destroyed. But homeless migrants and asylum seekers with no other solution often quickly set up camp elsewhere in the city in squalid locations that are becoming more and more remote.
Pierre Henry from the aid group France terre d’asile said: “This is an issue of dignity. Street camps should not exist in our country.”
Paris has long faced problems of migrants and asylum seekers sleeping rough, separate to issues around Calais, where a makeshift camp of up to 8,000 people was dismantled 18 months ago.
Macron’s proposed immigration law, currently being examined by the French senate, seeks to criminalise illegal border crossing, and speed up the processes for asylum requests and expelling people unable to claim asylum. Aid groups have argued the plan does not set out a long-term system to receive and provide shelter for those arriving in France.