Calais Update (02/10/18)
Refugee rights defender convicted for tweet | People taking greater risks at the border | 1300 people now sleeping rough in Dunkirk | More walls in Calais | Volunteers needed!
Our good friend Loan Torondel, a former long-term volunteer with l’Auberge des Migrants and the person responsible for bringing the Info Bus back to Calais in May 2017, was convicted of defamation last week. His crime? A tweet, which he posted in January 2018, showing an image of two police officers standing over a refugee. The tweet suggests that the police were about to take away the man’s sleeping bag, despite it being winter. This conviction sets a “dangerous precedent for anybody attempting to document the disproportionate use of force employed by the police.” — Nicolas Krameyer, Amnesty International France.
Loan plans to appeal the conviction.
On Thursday night, three people fell from a ferry into the port. Two were rescued, but one is still missing. With winter approaching and living conditions deteriorating, people are taking greater and greater risks. We fear that many more lives have and will be unnecessarily lost at the border.
A few weeks ago, a mass eviction at Grande-Synthe saw the shelter of hundreds of men, women and children removed. People were boarded onto buses destined for accommodation centres across France, with reports of numbers written on their necks and cable-ties around their wrists in some cases. Tasers were seen to be used during this eviction. It is recorded that some buses drove around for hours, without giving people on board food or water, then dropped them back off in Grande-Synthe by an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night.
Two weeks on, and numbers have now increased in Grande-Synthe from around 700 to around 1300. These are men, women and children, families with babies, people of all ages, who do not have access to shelter. If you can, please visit Help Refugees’ “Get Involved” section of their website and donate tents or set up a monthly donation to keep people dry. A tent is not a home. A tent is not a solution. But a tent could be the difference between life or death. Mobile Refugee Support and Refugee Community Kitchen also operate daily with this community.
Work has begun on a wall encircling an area in Calais known as “Little Forest”, where the Eritrean community gathered to sleep, eat and pray. This has been planned for months, and is supposedly to preserve the patch of land from being ruined, as well as to end disruption for local residents. The Great Wall of Calais continues to grow…
Volunteers are needed in Calais! In the winter, volunteer numbers can drop to as low as 20–30 people a day, with those who are here stretching themselves extremely thin to ensure the survival of those we help. Whether you can come for a day, a month, three months or more, your contribution is invaluable. Get involved here.
If you have a legal background or language skills (Arabic, Pashto, Amharic, Tigrinya, Farsi, Kurdish), and can volunteer for a month or more — please get in touch with us at Refugee Info Bus!
Would you like to support our work on the ground? With your help we can continue our work with displaced people in Calais and Athens, with our reporting on the situation on the ground. Support us for £ 5 a month, or see other options here!
And while you’re at it, sign up to our newsletter “NEWS FROM THE ROAD” , for more updates from the ground in Calais and Athens!
