Almost a year ago to the day, Le Revers de la Medal, a collective formed by around a hundred solidarity associations (Secours catholique, ATD Quart Monde, etc.), called on the public authorities to ensure that the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP) of Paris 2024 do not weigh on the most precarious and leave a positive social legacy.
Its final report, published Monday November 4, draws a grim assessment: “All the field data that we have collected shows that the French State will not have been up to the task”orchestrant “a thorough social cleansing” and sending “strong anti-democratic signals”.
THE “small victories” obtained constitute above all, according to the authors, « social washing ». The 256 accommodation places created for the “greatly marginalized”? “These are dignified and sustainable places, which show what the State is capable of doing, but it is very little considering the needs: 3,500 people on the street had been identified during Solidarity Night [en février, à Paris] »critic Aurélia Huot, deputy director of the access to law and justice division of the Barreau de Paris Solidarité endowment fund.
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The numerous evictions from camps accompanied by sheltering organized by the prefecture in mid-July, just before the Games? The Ile-de-France prefecture then indicated to the Monde take advantage of a drop in arrivals of exiled people to make available the places reserved for them. An explanation that Paul Alauzy, health monitoring coordinator at Médecins du Monde and spokesperson for the Le Revers de la Medal collective, disputes: “It’s been months since almost anyone was directed to these places. As if, despite the needs, the State services had kept them empty, to be able to use them during the JOP. »
“Policy of invisibilization”
During the Games themselves, he said, “no large grouping of tents was visible and police patrols prevented people from re-establishing themselves in campsites”. Ce “social cleansing”which the collective has been describing for several months, is confirmed by the non-exhaustive count carried out by the Observatory of expulsions from informal living spaces: between the end of April 2023 and the end of September 2024, it was aware of 260 expulsions of squats, shanty towns and camps, an increase of 60% compared to the same period two years earlier. They affected 19,526 people, an increase of 33%, including at least 4,550 minors, three times more than in 2021-2022.
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