the collective The Reverse of the Medal denounces “a social cleansing”

According to this collective, made up of more than 100 associations, including Médecins du Monde and Emmaüs, nearly 20,000 people were evicted from their informal living spaces between April 2023 and September 2024.

The collective denounces “social cleansing operations by public authorities, before, during and after the Games“. 19,526 people were evicted from their informal living spaces between April 2023 and September 2024, revealed this Monday the Le Revers de la Medal collective, made up of more than 100 associations, including Médecins du Monde and Emmaüs.

The associations make a direct link between the expulsions of homeless people and the organization of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. “There are images, there are internal state documents which talk about this strategy, there are prefectural expulsion orders where it is marked, there is the Olympic reason on it“, declared to France Inter Paul Alauzy, the spokesperson for the collective.

In total, there were 260 expulsion operations during the Paris Olympic Games (JOP), an increase of 41% compared to the 2022-2023 period. “The JOPs clearly acted as an accelerator of these dispersions and removals, in order to increase the invisibility of the most precarious people, considered undesirable in the public space of the capital and its region.explains the collective.

According to The Reverse of the Medal, 4,550 minors were victims of these expulsions, three times more than in 2021-2022. At the same time, the State has mobilized 256 accommodation places to get people in very precarious circumstances off the streets. Of “social washing“, denounces Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for the collective. “It is a communication operation because it is only a small drop of water in the ocean of homelessness […]. We could and should have done so much better“.

A deliberate strategy by the public authorities to keep the homeless away from the capital during the Olympics which was carried out according to the collective through “disproportionate use of measures restricting fundamental freedoms and incarceration“The police forces are particularly singled out for having exercised”pressure on all levels of society which, in the minds of the authorities, could have disrupted the festivities“.

The other side of the coin makes recommendations so that “social cleansing“be no more “the standard for major international sporting events“, starting with “open consultations with civil society actors, as well as those primarily concerned“. “Never again should Games be organized without thinking about their social legacy“, concludes the collective, which already wishes to form other activist groups to influence the next Olympics.