“Around a hundred children and adolescents have been on the streets in dramatic conditions since the start of winter,” Doctors Without Borders (MSF) lamented this Tuesday. The NGO immediately announced that it had opened an emergency accommodation location in Calais, in coordination with local associations, to accommodate vulnerable migrants.
This 20-place system, through the rental of rooms in a hotel, will primarily accommodate “unaccompanied minors whose request for shelter has been refused by child protection services”. It will also be accessible to families with children, shipwreck survivors and people in poor health, according to a press release from the association. Each person will be able to stay there for a maximum of fifteen days, so that more exiles can benefit from this system, explained MSF.
“The State is failing in its duty of protection”
“The State is failing in its duty of protection, so how can we resolve to leave them like this, prey to bad weather, violence, criminal networks? », protests the coordinator of MSF activities in Calais, Ali Besnaci, quoted in the press release. “Our action will help to overcome these failures,” he continues, calling on the State to “offer without delay a dignified and lasting response” to “people exiled in Calais”.
According to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, there are currently 1,242 emergency accommodation places in the department. State services also open hangars in Calais in the event of extreme cold, but this system proves to be “difficult to access and limited,” points out MSF.
During the dismantling of camps in Calais, the prefecture organizes shelters for migrants, but far from the coast, in order not to rebuild attachment points there, and the associations regularly denounce their “forced” and unsuitable nature. to the expectations of the exiles.
More than six years after leaving, MSF announced, last May, its return to Calais to compensate for the “undersizing of state systems” for the care of migrants and to provide them with “medico-social and psychological” support. “.