(AFP) Undocumented migrants living in makeshift camps in northern France have been subjected to an “unprecedented” violation of their basic rights over the past three years, the country’s human rights ombudsman said in a report Wednesday.
Jacques Toubon said that migrants camped out along France’s northern coast and in Paris were “in a state of extreme destitution, deprived of all shelter and preoccupied with trying to fulfil their basic needs: to eat, to drink and to wash.”
In 2015 he had already sounded the alarm over the plight of migrants in the squalid Jungle shantytown at the port city of Calais, which at its peak was home to around 10,000 people hoping to stow away on trucks crossing the Channel to Britain.
