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Paris to open first refugee camp
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PARIS will open its first refugee camp in mid-October, Mayor Anne Hidalgo said yesterday, unveiling plans to take hundreds of people off the streets as France struggles to accommodate migrants.
The emergency shelter, which will have an initial capacity of 400 and be solely for men, will be housed on an old railway site in the north of the French capital, Hidalgo said.
Asylum-seekers will be allowed to stay there for “five to 10 days” and receive medical care while waiting for a place in a refugee hostel, the Socialist mayor told reporters.
France has not been on the frontline of the vast influx of migrants to Europe in the last 18 months, with many refugees seeing it mainly as a transit country to other destinations in northern Europe.
But it has an acute shortage of accommodation for asylum seekers, leaving many people to fend for themselves.
Hidalgo said a second center, for women and children only, will be opened in Ivry-sur-Seine to the southeast of Paris by the end of the year, she added.
The 6.5-million-euro (US$7.2 million) Paris shelter will open in an area where hundreds of migrants have been sleeping rough, on the pavement or under railway bridges. By year end, it will have 600 beds.
The camp will be located not far from Paris’s Gare du Nord train station, which is the main terminal for Eurostar trains to London. The women’s shelter will have 350 places.
Hidalgo, who had announced in May that she would set up a camp in Paris, called it a “first for Europe” and said it was France’s duty to accommodate migrants in “humane” conditions.
Hostility towards migrants, particularly Muslim migrants, has been growing in France in recent months.
A new reception center in the Essonne area south of Paris was torched on Monday night, investigators said. The center for Sudanese and Afghan men had been due to open in October.
Around 80,000 people applied for asylum in France last year.
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