French Police Harass Charity Workers Aiding Refugees In Northern France - Report

French Police Harass Charity Workers Aiding Refugees in Northern France - Report

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 05th June, 2019) Police in northern France have verbally and physically assaulted volunteers trying to help foreigners living in the streets after a sprawling migrant camp was evicted near Calais in 2016, a report out Wednesday said.

The so-called Jungle camp in the French city of Calais housed 6,500 people when it was demolished in 2016. Amnesty International said French reception centers could not take in them all, while police were ordered to stop migrants from setting up new tent camps. An estimated 391 evictions from makeshift camps have been carried out this year alone.

"Those who defend the rights of people on the move are caught between the acute needs and suffering inflicted on people ... and the intimidation, harassment, and abuse used by French authorities to hamper humanitarian activities," the Amnesty International said.

In its newest publication, titled "Targeting Solidarity," the watchdog cited dozens of testimonies by human rights defenders who suffered police abuse and government indifference as they went about their daily work providing humanitarian aid to migrants.

Several activists said that intimidation, threats of arrest and abuse became "part and parcel" of their work. They reported being insulted, pushed to the ground, teargassed, subjected to humiliating body searches and in one instance being choked by police in the past two-and-half years.

Authorities have obstructed and in some cases started baseless prosecutions against the activists, while ignoring complaints against police violence. The report said that the mayor of Calais banned giving food to migrants in 2017 as a "risk to peace and security."

"Rather than treating human rights defenders as the enemy, the authorities should see them as a vital ally, and celebrate acts of solidarity and compassion rather than criminalizing them," Amnesty International's human rights defenders researcher Lisa Maracani said.

Several makeshift camps sprang along France's English Channel coast in the wake of the refugee influx to Europe in 2014-2015. Thousands of mostly African and Central Asian migrants set up tents in the hope of one day reaching the United Kingdom, prompting protests from local residents.