PARRIS (AFP) – In the run-up to the Paris Olympic Games, human rights activists have reported that French authorities are engaged in “social cleansing”, a government policy of removing the homeless from the city. 
A number of non-profits have presented evidence documenting the methods used by the authorities to “manage” the most vulnerable populations in the Paris region both before and during the Games. 
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 Île-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 médaille, (“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 Médecins 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 médaille 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 médaille. “What we’re observing on the ground echoes what happened at previous Olympics abroad: they don’t want the most marginalized people to be visible to cameras or tourists.”