Olympics 2024: Fury as homelessness 'swept under the rug' and rough sleepers removed from Paris

From torch-lighting to the oath, the Olympic Games are not short of traditions.

But in recent decades, a more troubling custom has developed: the mass relocation of homeless people away from the view of international visitors.

Thousands of rough sleepers have been removed from Paris ahead of the 2024 games, a drive described by campaigners as “appalling social cleansing”.

“They have simply dispersed the problem,” said Antoine de Clerck, campaigns manager at Collectif le Revers de la Médaille, a group of rights organizations and local charities.

“It is appalling. People are basically swept under the rug.”

The ‘clean-up’ operation started in March 2022, de Clerck claimed, with some 13,000 people moved on since then.

Inhabitants of the city’s informal settlements, squats and encampments are told to get on a bus to the provinces where temporary shelter is provided. The alternative is to ‘move along’.

“No one is forced onto the bus, but either you get on the bus, or you go away,” de Clerck said. “We are France – we are supposed to be the country for human rights! Yet there is no support, no real plan.”

The buses take people to regional hubs, where they are provided with shelter for three weeks. Most then end up back on the streets, stranded in a new town.

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“Last week, there was a massive dispersal on one of the northern canals leading into the city. 400 people had been there for around three years,” said de Clerck.

“Yet they are on one of the main bicycle paths leading into the city, where people will pass them coming to see the games. So now they are gone. The camp wasn’t perfect but the alternative is they are spread out, homeless with no shelter in cities they don’t know.”

Food distribution and support services in the city are being suspended or even stopped altogether.

FEANTSA – the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless – have described this as a “predictable” but “concerning” development. They called for the suspension of all evictions and shanty-town demolitions.

“Mega-events have historically had negative social impacts,” a spokesperson said.

The Olympics are not the only mega-events here people experienced homelessness have been moved on. FEANTSA also cited similar measures in Berlin ahead of the UEFA European Championships and in Barcelona as it prepares to host the Americas’ Cup sailing competition next month.

But it didn’t have to be this way in Paris. With €10m, Collectif Le Revers de la Médaille could have “housed everyone”, de Clerck said.

“Exactly the same thing happens every Olympics. We were afraid, so we said, to the government and the Olympic Committee, let’s make this the first Olympics where this doesn’t happen,” he added.

“We said with €10m we could sheltered everyone. The Olympic Committee, which is spending €12bn, said ‘we don’t have enough money,’ go to the state. The state pushed us away, too.

“We could have done it [sheltered everyone], we have the capacity. But there was just no willingness.”

Instead, authorities have engaged in the “harassment, expulsion and invisibilisation” of rough sleepers, Le Revers de la Médaille have said. But city hall has blamed the central government.

“I am angry about this being pushed on to the city [authority] because it’s not our role or responsibility and we already play more than our part in finding urgent accommodation for vulnerable people,” Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, said last year.

Most of the people being bussed away from the city are migrants. The relocations are a racial justice issue, said Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.

“France is engaged in racial/ethnic cleansing in the guise of clearance of homeless immigrants in Paris, all justified by yet another mega event: the Olympics,” he posted on X. “Can the Olympic Committee again go along with this, after similar lessons from past Olympics?”

Speaking to the Big Issue last month, Rajagopal condemned how migrants are often scapegoated for housing shortages.

“It’s the foreigners, the people who don’t look like us, that are demonised, although they are not the root cause of housing problems people are facing.”

The mass dispersals contrast vividly with the Olympic Committee’s celebration of the Refugee team.

In May, IOC President Thomas Bach said that the team’s participation “sends a message of hope to the more than 100 million displaced people around the world”.

But this sort of language is “hypocritical”, de Clerck said, if it isn’t accompanied by concrete support for displaced migrants.

“It’s OK to celebrate the refugees that have been selected. It is great that they have access to elite sport,” he said.

“But so many do not have access to those opportunities. And there is no support for them, instead they are being pushed away.”

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