In Paris, police step up encampment evictions ahead of the Olympics

In Paris, police step up encampment evictions ahead of the Olympics

On a Tuesday morning in late May, at least three dozen police officers surrounded an encampment in central Paris. The streets above the banks of the Seine were virtually empty and the cafes still closed when they evicted more than 100 boys and young men, many from West Africa. It was just past 7 a.m.

“It’s always the same,” said Tomster Soumah from Guinea, who has been moved on more times than he can count. The stoic 16-year-old gathered his belongings in a plastic bag and joined his friends in search of a new spot on the other side of the city. 

As he left, he marvelled at the irony that Paris will host an estimated 10 million spectators for the upcoming Olympic Games. “They tell everyone, ‘Come!'” he said. “‘France is a land of liberty, solidarity and fraternity!’ But that’s not the reality, not for us.” 

Some 3,500 people were estimated to be homeless this year in Paris (likely an underestimate), a 16 per cent increase on last year.

Human rights groups say that in the approach to the Paris Olympics, police have stepped up evictions and deportations of people living and working on the streets of the capital and surrounding suburbs, in what some describe as social cleansing. 

“I have police officers who have told me their mission is to evict people quickly,” says Paul Alauzy, Doctors of the World co-ordinator. 

“The goal is to have a postcard Paris, and normally, that’s not something we would oppose. But this was a missed opportunity to find more dignified solutions, where people are not simply moved on and cut off from access to care.”

An increase in encampment evictions

Alauzy is also a spokesperson for Le revers de la médaille, or “the other side of the medal,” a coalition of more than 100 human rights groups advocating for marginalized people in the approach to the Olympic Games. 

The collective found in a June report that evictions have been steadily rising, from 121 operations in 2021-22 to 137 in 2023, accelerating at the end of that year to 16 evacuations in 17 weeks. 

Although many evictions are carried out in Paris, a city spokesperson stressed that the French government plans them, and that emergency accommodations are the federal body’s jurisdiction. 

Paris “is calling for the State to … shelter people in the many vacant buildings,” the spokesperson said.

Many hotels once renting out rooms to the homeless under government contracts are now returning to tourism, contributing to the steep decline in available beds. 

To relieve the pressure, the Greater Paris prefecture arranges to have homeless migrants bussed to other regions, like Bordeaux and Lyon. 

“It’s intolerable that they should live this way,” said a prefecture spokesperson. “In the greater Paris area, there is shelter for up to 120,000 people, and we’ve reached a saturation point.” 

A continuing cycle

That Tuesday, only three out of more than 100 people boarded the bus bound for Lyon, according to rights workers on site. Few ever take them. 

After previously taking one, Arouna Sidibe, 41, from Côte d’Ivoire, vowed never to do so again. Sidibe fled his country in 2016, fearing for his life after falling out with a powerful family member. 

He was among more than 150 people evicted from a Paris gymnasium last fall. Having been homeless for more than seven years, he and his partner Ramatou Koné, 26, boarded a bus for Normandy in the hopes of getting shelter until his refugee application was settled. But after just five months, they were told to leave the hotel room there, paid for by the government. 

They returned to Paris, where Sidibe works as a carpenter.  

He now awaits a ruling on his appeal to the rejection of his refugee status. “It’s so tiring,” he said. “We’ve already been here for eight years, and we’re going to leave the country? To go where?” 

In addition to waiting on court decisions, many people remain in Paris to work or study, or have friends and family here. So the cycle continues: They sleep somewhere until the police dislodge them, then they find a new place until they’re discovered again. 

In 2023, under pressure from the fast-rising far-right National Rally, French President Emmanuel Macron’s government passed immigration legislation so tough that NR’s Marine Le Pen called it an “ideological victory.”

“The most precarious people are being criminalized, as street vendors, sex workers and homeless people are being issued with fines and deportation orders,” said Aurélia Huot, a member of the Paris Solidarity Bar association and of Le revers de la médaille. 

“They are appearing in court for misdemeanours that normally wouldn’t be penalized.”

Most policed event in Paris history

Spikes and rocks have been used to ward off people sleeping rough, such as under the bridge near Gare d’Austerlitz, where the Olympic Opening Ceremony will occur on July 26. 

“I was shocked to see these anti-homeless measures,” says Olivier Le Marois, 63, an entrepreneur who lives nearby. “I read about the evictions, and it’s like we’re in the early Soviet Union, where they show you a model city and hide everything that’s wrong!” 

Recent surveys indicate that half of those polled intend to follow the Games this summer, with views of the event — and preparations — decidedly mixed. 

“It’s a big challenge, of course, but it can give a beautiful reflection of Paris, of France,” said Jean-Christophe, 43, a restaurant head waiter. He provided only his first name.

“In terms of security and hygiene, [the clearing of camps] is something that absolutely had to be done,” he said. “Of course, it would be ideal to find alternatives for these people.” 

Residents near the Olympic village have also been forced to move. Thousands of students in the north of Paris and neighbouring boroughs had their lease agreements cut short to make way mainly for Olympics personnel. That sparked a protest and campaign to resist eviction.

It will be the most-policed sporting event in the capital’s history, with up to 45,000 law enforcement officers deployed in and around Paris. 

“The closer we get to the Olympics, the more we will saturate public spaces with police officers,” Paris Police Chief Laurent Nuñez told le Parisien newspaper. 

None of this has stopped France from billing Paris 2024 as being inclusive and “open to all.”

Not unique to Paris Olympics

“This isn’t new — we see this in all the Olympics,” says Melora Koepke, a Paris-based Canadian human geographer. “People designated as ‘undesirable’ in public space are … controlled by police forces and political pressures.” 

Earlier this year, Koepke held workshops in Vancouver and Paris, where Canadian and French community organizers, scholars and those with lived experience examined the impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics on vulnerable people in Vancouver. 

As early as 2008, police were criticized for carrying out a “ticketing blitz” for such things as loitering and panhandling, targeting marginalized people in the Downtown Eastside. 

“The patterns are the same,” said Caitlin Shane, a Vancouver-based lawyer who spoke at the workshop. 

“Displacing people from encampments … but never actually dealing with the systemic issues, which is an ever-increasing housing crisis — it’s all about optics.”

Le revers de la médaille says the Olympics Organizing Committee and corporate sponsors rejected its request for a “solidarity fund” of €10 million. It would have helped fund shelter, food and health care for people in need during and after the Games, and would have amounted to just over 0.1 per cent of the Games’ estimated €9-billion budget.

While Alauzy says the coalition has managed to “slow down the machine” of law enforcement by monitoring evictions and pressuring officers, he wants future hosts of the Olympic Games to go further.

The group isn’t opposed to the Games as a whole. But as a warning, Alauzy cited Denver, which cancelled its Games in 1972 in the wake of protests and public opposition over environmental concerns.

The coalition may not be able to stop the cycle of evictions in Paris. But its message is already spreading as far afield as Brisbane, which is holding the Olympics in 2032. 

“It’s a bit dizzying to be interviewed on Australian television about our little collective,” says Alauzy. 

“So we share our activist adventure, and tell them, ‘Build coalitions now, make sure you identify the risks, make demands and ensure that the promises are kept.'”

Published at Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

There’s an old problem Canada’s new foreign-interference law won’t fix

To understand Canada’s failure to criminally prosecute foreign collusion, an old news report from Washington offers a useful starting point.

In 1981, a Canadian correspondent made an observation: when it came to using security intelligence in policing, Canada and the U.S. were diverging onto opposite paths.

The Americans were ramping up, while Canadians were dialling down. The legacy of that era lingers to this day in an ongoing Ottawa scandal. And it’s unclear how much will change under a soon-to-be-enacted law.

Some Canadians might have been startled by a report earlier this month that politicians wittingly, and unwittingly, collaborated with foreign governments, getting campaign help and even receiving foreign donations.

The shocked did not include one intelligence veteran in Canada who worked closely with multiple U.S. agencies and has seen the night-and-day difference in how police in each country use surveillance.  

“It wasn’t a surprise to us,” said Scott McGregor, a military and police intelligence official who recently co-authored a book on Chinese interference in Canada. “This information has been around for a number of years.”

WATCH | Some MPs helping foreign actors meddle in Canadian politics, report says:

The ‘intelligence-to-evidence problem’

After the bombshell parliamentary report, the RCMP issued a lengthy statement that announced it was investigating. But in the next breath, it acknowledged serious roadblocks to investigating.

For starters, police get limited access to intelligence. The Mounties confirmed they’d been unaware of some details in that report.

There’s a striking example on Page 29: An Indian proxy allegedly claimed to have repeatedly transferred funds from India to Canadian politicians at all levels of government in exchange for political favours, like promoting certain issues in Parliament. Canada’s security-intelligence service had this information and did not share it with the RCMP, said the report.

The report and the Mounties both cited other obstacles. Even if police had seen the intelligence, using it in a trial is another, more complicated, story.

The foreign-interference legislation that just passed Parliament, Bill C-70, doesn’t solve this problem. Two former heads of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service agree on that point. 

While parts of the legislation might prove useful, Ward Elcock and Richard Fadden both told CBC News, attempts to prosecute will keep bumping into unresolved constitutional challenges.

“That can be a killer [for criminal cases],” Elcock said.

There’s even an industry acronym for this issue, says a former CSIS analyst, who describes it as a core factor in Canada’s struggle to prosecute national-security cases.

“We all call it the intelligence-to-evidence problem — I2E,” said Stephanie Carvin, now an associate professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

A fork in the road: 1981

Carvin identified the early 1980s as an inflection point.

At the time, the U.S. was just emerging from a post-Watergate era, in which its intelligence services had been marred by scandal and disrepute. President Ronald Reagan signed executive orders and multiple national-security directives that encouraged intelligence agencies to co-operate with police.

Meanwhile in Canada, a multi-year inquiry found the RCMP had engaged in inexcusable and illegal behaviour while conducting intelligence work: burning a barn, opening mail, breaking-and-entering and stealing a political party’s member data. 

The government of that era had turned a blind eye to such activity, which was, in part, a reaction to the 1970 Quebec terrorist crisis. 

When the inquiry report came out, Pierre Trudeau’s government accepted its key recommendation, stripping the RCMP of its security-intelligence role and handing it to a new civilian agency, CSIS.

The man who led CSIS as it was being created candidly admitted he had no intelligence experience. This was seen as a positive.

“I’m a neophyte,” Fred Gibson, previously a low-profile civil servant, told The Toronto Star in 1981. 

To this day, Canada does not have a separate foreign-intelligence service like the CIA or Britain’s MI6; CSIS serves the domestic-security role played by the FBI or Britain’s MI5.

Getting information back to the RCMP has its challenges. 

WATCH | ‘By law’ feds can’t release MP names in foreign interference report, LeBlanc says:

Intelligence services are understandably wary of having secrets spill out. For example, Carvin said applications for a CSIS warrant might be 50 pages long and loaded with details that could get sources killed.

Those applications are not public, but if they’re to be used in a criminal case, they must be scrutinized in a more public setting. 

In court: ‘That’s where these cases fall apart’

Defence lawyers have a right to learn how a warrant was obtained, and can challenge it on constitutional grounds, a right entrenched in a 1990 Supreme Court decision. 

If CSIS can’t satisfy the court, the information from the wiretaps is tossed out, Carvin said.

“CSIS is basically going to have to come into court and be like, ‘Yeah, we got this from [our informant] Sarah, and Sarah’s gonna be killed by the Russians,'” Carvin said. “And that’s usually where these cases fall apart.”

She points to one failed case, involving Canadian military shipbuilding secrets being sent to China. Following a years-long dispute over communications intercepted from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa, the charges were dropped.

McGregor recalled how former police colleagues would actively recoil from accessing intelligence. To them, it was likelier to hurt their case than help.

“I’ve brought information to the RCMP and have them say, ‘Don’t say anything, because it’ll taint the case,'” McGregor said. “It happened more than once.”

He compares that to what he’s seen from international peers. He worked frequently with Five Eyes civilian and military agencies during his career in counterterrorism, narcotics, money-laundering and piracy, in his roles with Canada’s military, the RCMP and the B.C. government, in the Middle East and in North America.

A local U.S. police force, for example, might want to wiretap a drug gang. It could get funding for the operation from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, then share its findings with the DEA, which is enmeshed in the broader U.S. intelligence community.

“The United States understands intelligence,” McGregor said. “In Canada, law enforcement doesn’t have the same comprehension of what intelligence is.”

It’s no surprise, he said, that U.S. intelligence drove several of the highest-profile national security cases involving Canada.

Through U.S. cases, Canadians learned details of the alleged Indian government-directed killings of Sikh nationalists on Canadian soil; of Iranian intelligence allegedly hiring Canadians to conduct assassinations in the U.S.; of a crackdown on a so-called Chinese police station in New York that had some Canadian connections.

U.S. intelligence powers expand after 9/11

Even in the arrest of a top RCMP official who co-ordinated the force’s use of intelligence, there was a U.S. role.

It was an arrest in Washington state that broke open the case against Cameron Ortis, the former director general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre, who now faces 14 years in prison for leaking state secrets, pending an appeal.

“A significant percentage of our cases start with U.S. intelligence,” Carvin said. “They have more agencies, more people, and … they put resources into this.”

This accelerated after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a torrent of changes in U.S. law, said Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and founder of the Lawfare blog.

Post-2001 reforms expanded the use of intelligence in U.S. policing with the Patriot Act, follow-up legislation and related court cases. An inquiry into the attacks found that foreign-focused intelligence agencies and the domestic-focused FBI communicated poorly, and subsequent reforms not only further integrated their work, but made it easier to get a surveillance warrant.

As Canada opened public consultations for what’s now Bill C-70, the federal government said it was considering reforming how intelligence is used as criminal evidence.

But the bill, which just passed the Senate this week and will become law, does little on that front.

Criminalizing collusion

C-70 does other things. Agents of foreign countries will have to sign onto a public registry in Canada, as they do in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

In addition, it will be a crime to collude with a foreign government — potentially punishable by a life sentence. Collusion is defined as someone engaging in deceptive conduct, at the direction of a foreign government, to influence a Canadian political process like legislation, a party nomination or an election platform.

Carvin calls the failure to resolve the so-called I2E problem a major disappointment.

“I do understand why the RCMP is frustrated,” she said. “Until we fix this, we can pass as many laws as we want. But we’re never going to be able to prosecute the way we should.”

Former CSIS director Fadden said he spent years trying to crack this problem. He retains hope politicians might yet write a law that achieves two contradictory goals: letting defendants access intelligence as per their constitutional right, while keeping the details secret.

In Elcock’s view, the only ways to resolve this issue are reforming the Constitution, or the courts setting new legal precedents.

Until then, he said, prosecuting cases using intelligence will remain more difficult in Canada than in allied countries, like the U.S., and the U.K., which have different constitutional realities.

“You can’t simply wish this problem away,” he said.

Published at Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000