The first purpose-built camp in France to provide proper, humanitarian-standard shelter to refugees who are currently sleeping rough is to open near the port of Dunkirk next month.
Médecins sans Frontières is completing a camp of wooden structures that will provide heated shelter, sufficient drinking water, kitchens, showers and sanitation to meet minimum UN humanitarian standards.
About 2,500 people including more than 250 children – many of them Kurdish families fleeing violence in northern Iraq – are sleeping rough in appalling conditions on mud-soaked land in the town of Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk. Flooding and rats are rife amid freezing temperatures, and doctors have had to treat outbreaks of scabies and measles as well as respiratory infections.
The conditions in Grande-Synthe – once described as France’s “forgotten” refugee scandal – are far worse than in the Jungle camp at Calais and were described by one MSF official as “the worst I’ve seen in 20 years of humanitarian work”.
The local Green mayor, Damien Carême, approached MSF and asked the organisation to construct temporary shelters, saying he was exasperated by what he deemed to be the inaction of the French Socialist government.
The new temporary site will open in March specifically for those rehoused from the nearby Grande-Synthe slum. It will be run by aid organisations.
