Strasbourg will attack the State for its "failure" to accommodate people on the street

"Despite proactive action by the City of Strasbourg, the creation of 500 accommodation places, the opening of a gymnasium, our (municipal) resources are not sufficient to respond to this great distress and this humanitarian crisis. protected falls under the State, there is a deficiency, so I decided that the city of Strasbourg would bring an action for liability against the State, because of this failure", declared the elected EELV during the 'a press conference.

Ms. Barseghian did not give a date for the referral to the court, obviously the administrative court (TA), explaining that it would take place "as soon as possible".

"We are next to elected officials, we have maintained the level of emergency accommodation at an extremely high level", with "198,000 places in France", retorted Olivier Klein, Minister Delegate for the City and Housing. Conceding a "difficult situation", he assured AFP that the state was playing "its role". "Mayors are expected" to also play theirs, he added.

"France is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis with, in all the major French cities, hundreds of people (...), children, who are on the streets in the cold, without rights, without access to care, in the misery", resumed the environmentalist mayor, deploring that the State does not act "within the responsibilities" and "the skills which are its own".

- Macron's "promise" -

"Strasbourg is no exception to the rule", she added, inviting "all elected officials" and "all associations" of France who wish to "join this action for liability against the State".

At the end of October, with a dozen mayors of major cities in France, Ms. Barseghian denounced in a letter to Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne a planned drop in emergency accommodation places in hotels in France, on which the government finally returned. .

"I remind you all the same that one of Emmanuel Macron's first promises in 2017 was that at the end (of that same year), there would be no one left on the street," he said. Ms. Barseghian, deploring a promise "absolutely not kept".

The mayor of the Alsatian capital was speaking on Monday morning, when a migrant camp was about to be evacuated by the police, after the decision on Friday of the Strasbourg TA: seized by the Bas-Rhin prefecture, this the latter had then ordered the city to dismantle it within three days.

Ms. Barseghian noted that this judgment did not rule on the sheltering of the people who live there.

- "Weapon passes" -

"We can take refuge in a complaint" but "my feeling is that the deficiency does not come from the State but (...) from the town hall which did not want, while the situation in this camp was deteriorating, to play its responsibility”, still estimated Mr. Klein.

Located since the end of May in Place de l'Etoile, near the hyper-centre and a stone's throw from the town hall, it has counted up to 200 people, many of them from Georgia, Albania and Macedonia, including children. According to Floriane Varieras, assistant in charge of the inclusive city, there were still around fifty people left at the camp on Monday morning.

Installed in tents, some of the families camping on site have to live with rats, while the temperatures are lower and lower. The town hall, which says it is at the end of what it can do in terms of accommodation, had opened a gymnasium in mid-September to shelter certain migrants.

This camp was at the center of several passes of arms between Ms. Barseghian and the prefect, Josiane Chevalier.

The latter argued that it was up to the town hall, owner of the land, to request the evacuation of the irregular camp to justice. What Ms. Barseghian had always refused to do, already criticizing the State for not assuming its responsibilities in terms of reception.