Just a day after the ceremonial lighting of the Paris 2024 Olympic flame in Greece on April 16, accompanied by oaths to friendship and solidarity, French authorities began evicting hundreds of migrants from France's largest squat in Vitry-sur-Seine, south of Paris. Those evicted were encouraged to board buses that would take them to other parts of France.

It was the third major eviction operation carried out in the Île-de-France region, comprising Paris and its surrounding areas, since the start of 2023. In April 2023, some 400 people were removed from a squat located near the Olympic Village on Ile-Saint-Denis in the capital's northern suburbs. Two hundred more were evicted in July 2023 from a squat in Thiais south of Paris.

These evictions, among other operations seen as targeting the homeless, quickly caught the attention of the associations tasked with helping those in vulnerable situations.

In October 2023, more than 80 non-profits who work with migrants and the homeless joined forces to form the umbrella group Le Revers de la medaille, ("The Other Side of the Medal") to denounce what they called the "social cleansing" taking place on the streets of Paris in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

"There are various pieces of evidence that allow us to use the term 'social cleansing'," said Paul Alauzy, the group's spokesperson and campaigner for migrant safety at the NGO Medecins du Monde.

"Eviction operations are not new, they were not created with the Olympic Games in mind," he said. "But what has changed as the Games draw closer is the frequency with which occupied sites are cleared, and the systematic sending of those removed to another French region."

To get an overall picture of the action taken by the authorities, the participating groups of the Revers de la medaille have collected their findings from field research for the period of April 2023 to May 2024 in a report published on June 5.

"A number of indicators suggest that the Olympic and Paralympic Games are accelerating the dispersal and removal of people in vulnerable situations," the report says.

For more than a year, the report says, the authorities have been targeting a number of groups: the homeless, migrants, Roma people, sex workers and drug users.

"To create a picture-postcard city, we relocate people and make them invisible," says Antoine de Clerck, a campaigner from Revers de la medaille. "What we're observing on the ground echoes what happened at previous Olympics abroad: they don't want the most marginalised people to be visible to cameras or tourists."

Sharp increase in evacuations

The authorities have for several months denied any correlation between the eviction policy now in place and the upcoming Olympics in the French capital.

"This has nothing to do with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there's no social cleansing," France’s Sports Minister Amélie Oudea-Castera said in March.

On the subject of the removal of homeless people from the Paris region, she said: "This emergency accommodation policy aims to spread the burden across the country ... Operations of this type are carried out regularly, it's not dictated by the Olympic and Paralympic agenda."

The means used in dealing with the homeless, however, have raised concerns. At the start of the year, France's independent Defender of Rights Claire Hedon announced she was launching an investigation into "the eviction from public spaces of people deemed 'undesirable' in the run-up to the (Olympics)", as well as "the redirecting of homeless people living in Paris to temporary regional reception facilities". Her report has not yet been made public.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, meanwhile, called on France in April to address the plight of "marginalised groups".

"Evictions to beautify Paris before [the Olympics] are similar to what China, India or many others have done before other mega-events. How does France justify this?" he asked on X.

“Since this system was set up, no more places have been offered in temporary housing in the Ile-de-France region," Alauzy said. "Each time the authorities conduct evictions, those evicted are offered a place on a bus bound for a particular town – without knowing exactly what the future holds for them.”

This was the experience of Omar, a Sudanese refugee who arrived in France in 2017. Omar, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, shared his experience with FRANCE 24 at the end of May.

He has held a 10-year residence permit since 2018, and worked on a series of short contracts on building sites.

Despite his legal status, the 27-year-old has been living in a precarious situation for years. Initially housed by friends, he then moved into a squat in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, before moving to the Vitry-sur-Seine squat four years ago.

On the morning of April 17, he was relocated like the other occupants of the squat – including Chadians, Eritreans, Ethiopians and Ivorians – when authorities decided to “rehouse” the squatters.

"I was at work when I got the call from someone from an association. I told my boss that tomorrow I might have a place to stay. Once I got back to the squat, there were a lot of people and the police too," said Omar.

Despite his job in Paris – he had a three-month fixed-term contract at the time – he boarded a bus that took him to the temporary reception centre in Orléans, a city 130km south of Paris. There, he stayed for three weeks in a run-down hotel in a commercial zone on the city's outskirts.

"I was in my room almost all the time," says Omar. "Sometimes I'd go out towards the city centre to feel a bit alive, but I felt like a prisoner in that place."

After three weeks, he was told he had to leave the temporary shelter, without being offered any alternative accommodation.

"I had no choice but to leave on the last day. In the end, I lost my place in the squat, I lost my job on the building site and now I have no housing solution", said Omar, who is now staying with friends until he finds a new place to live.

He's still bitter about his time in temporary detention.

"I never thought I'd live like this in France," he said. "I'm really tired of being homeless, it's always the same story."

Not solving the problem

According to the Revers de la medaille group, 3,958 of the 6,000 or so people sheltered by the Ile-de-France prefecture in 2023 were transferred to regional temporary reception shelters.

For the authorities, the main aim of setting up these regional shelters is to relieve overcrowding in the Paris region's emergency accommodation system.

The Paris mayor’s office told FRANCE 24 that "there are more and more people on the streets".

"In 2024, there were 3,492 people without accommodation in Paris, which represents a particularly worrying increase from 2023 of around 16 percent," the office said, adding that the figure was a low estimate. 

Complicating the situation, some hotels that used to house rough sleepers have shifted to catering to tourists before the Olympics.

But the emergency accommodation situation is no better elsewhere in France. Both the mayor of Orleans and the Strasbourg mayor's office have criticised the government for its handling of the problem.

"It's more a case of displacing the problem than of solving it,” said Strasbourg's deputy mayor Floriane Varieras. “The problem of homelessness is not going to be solved just by 'regional temporary shelters'."

Just how sustainable the policy is remains in question. According to several of the associations interviewed, Paris's police prefecture said that the system would be financed "until the end of 2024".

In other words, just a few months after the Olympics are over. What's next? When contacted by FRANCE 24, the public authorities had no answer to the question of how long the regional shelters would function, or whether they would be extended beyond the end of the year.

(Source: France 24)