France

Police move homeless in tents from central Paris

Article published on the 2009-05-16 Latest update 2009-05-16 15:21 TU

Tents for homeless people line the Seine in Paris on Friday.
(Photo: Reuters)

On Friday evening, the French group The Children of Don Quichotte (Les enfants de Don Quichotte) set up about a hundred green tents on the right bank of the Seine in central Paris.

The aim of the tent installation was both to house some of Paris's homeless and also to send a message about their plight. The group organises tented housing for Paris's homeless in visible areas around the city.

They had announced a tent installation on the city's Place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Champs Elysées, but the temporary housing was actually installed a few hundred metres away on the edges of the Seine.

About a dozen homeless people turned up on Friday night with clothes and sleeping bags to spend the night in the improvised shelter. The tents were in place around 6.30pm and at 9pm hot soup was served by another group.

At half ten police arrived and removed the homeless people, returned their belongings and piled up the tents. The police operation was over by half eleven without incident but one of the heads of The Children of Don Quichotte, Augustin Legrand, said the removal of the tents could cost up to 3,500 euros.

By midnight, everyone had left.

The removal of the tents was criticised by France's New Anticapitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) which on Saturday called on the government to enforce laws that demand certain percentages of social housing in each municipality.

It said the government needed to build the "million of homes needed".