France intends to bulldoze half of the makeshift Jungle camp in Calais and authorities have given one week’s warning to between 800 and 1,000 migrants and refugees to leave a seven-hectare southern section of the site.
The Calais prefect, Fabienne Buccio, told Le Monde she intended to reduce the size of the camp by about half.
“The time has come to move on, no one must live in the southern part of the camp, everyone must leave this section,” she told Agence France-Presse, estimating that some 800 to 1,000 people would be affected.
Buccio said she and her staff would offer those leaving the camp a place in an alternative, purpose-built facility created using converted shipping containers. Alternatively, they could be helped to leave and travel to other accommodation centres in France.
Buccio told Le Monde 750 extra places in the containers would be offered from this weekend and further places would be found at centres across France.
About 4,000 people are living in squalid conditions in the Jungle as asylum seekers use it as a base from which they attempt to enter Britain via the Channel tunnel.
The camp sprang up in April last year as a state-sanctioned shanty town – an area of wasteland on a former rubbish tip where migrants living across Calais were deliberately directed by French police while their other squats and camps around the town were destroyed. At that time, the refugees and migrants concentrated on the site were promised access to showers and a daily meal at a nearby repurposed activity centre and told they would be “tolerated” on that scrap of wasteland, which charities complained was insalubrious and presented serious health risks.
But now, amid political rows about the size, conditions and permanency of the makeshift camp, the French authorities aim to reduce the Jungle in size.
“I think it’s our duty to bring this camp down to 2,000 people living in an organised and dignified camp. That is an acceptable number for the local population,” Buccio told Le Monde.
She had said last month the state’s aim was for “no more migrants sleeping outdoors”.
She said she aimed to get people to agree to move so they wouldn’t have to be forcibly evicted.
But some asylum seekers say they are afraid to transfer to the new containers, as they say the facility resembles a prison and does not have cooking facilities or communal areas – unlike the Jungle, which has shops, cafes, kitchens, churches and a mosque. The new container facility also requires palm prints to be taken to move in and out, which some fear could impede their efforts to reach Britain and apply for asylum there.
