‘French police abusing refugee children’

This video says about itself:

People Without Papers: How France Handles Its Refugees

1 December 2017

People Without Papers: Despite dwindling publicity, France remains a major destination for thousands of refugees in Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis. This report investigates their plight, as they face police evictions and general hostility.

“I came here to France but I experienced unspeakable problems on my way here”, says 24-year-old Afghan refugee Mustafa. “I have made an application for asylum, and the French government told me to wait for 18 months”, he says. There are many like Mustafa for whom French asylum remains a distant reward. In the meantime, rough sleeping and evasion of a frequently brutal French police, using tear gas and shooting rubber bullets, are a daily peril for those fleeing war.

“The methods that the French police are using are criminal”, says a ‘Help Refugees’ volunteer. Following the destruction of migrant camps, many are left without shelter. “No house, no tent, no nothing”, says Kurdish refugee Zirack, sifting through a deserted camp in the woods. “It’s a big problem for all children. But what can I do? It’s my country’s problem. I can’t stay in my country because my country’s a big, big problem“. For many of the migrants stuck in limbo throughout the camps, the prospect of a better life in the UK means risking all to cross the Channel.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Oxfam: French police are mistreating migrant children

The French border police mistreats migrant children physically and emotionally, forges their papers and puts them on trains to Italy illegally. This is what Oxfam Novib writes in a report. The organization says that children are locked up in cells without food, water or blankets before the police return them. They are also not assigned official guardians.

The organization writes that this concerns refugees and migrants from crowded Italian shelters, which France sends back to Italy. The French authorities are accused of forging the ages of the migrants and pretending that the children want to return to Italy.

Examples of abuses in the report include cases where agents cut off the soles of children’s shoes and of how policemen steal the SIM cards from phones. They also write about an Eritrean young woman, who is said to have been forced to walk 40 kilometers on an unpaved border road to Italy, with a six-week-old baby on her arm.

“Children, women and men fleeing persecution and war should not be victims of mistreatment and neglect by the French and Italian authorities“, says Evelien van Roemburg of Oxfam. “People who want to apply for asylum in a country where their family resides are constantly being thwarted.” …

The Oxfam report coincides with tensions between Italy and France over the Italian refusal of a ship with migrants. The French president Macron calls the migration policy of the new Italian government cynical because of this.

On this point, President Macron is correct. However, what about Macron‘s own police?

USA: Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both cited the Bible on Thursday to justify the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families at the southern border: here.

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless” ARE LITERALLY THE SCRIPTURAL WORDS OF A BIBLICAL PROPHET https://t.co/Ht8LWVhh4V

— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) June 14, 2018

When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am your God.
Leviticus 19:33-34 https://t.co/nWvu49BR7u

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) June 14, 2018