Evacuation of the slum of La Poterne in Lille: a procedure deemed “wobbly”

At the start of the week, Monday July 4, 2022, the La Poterne camp, located on boulevard Robert-Schuman, straddling Lille and Saint-André-lez-Lille, was evacuated. The three evicted families, after having been rehoused, find themselves, like the rest of the shantytown, without a solution for accommodation.

“It’s cold, we only have two blankets, there are cockroaches… I’m afraid to sleep”, confides Anna* from the squat where she is. She and her family are among the seven adults and thirteen children to have been expelled on Monday July 4 from the La Poterne camp, between Lille and Saint-André-lez-Lille. At dawn, these three families of Roma culture without fixed accommodation were taken to the Formula 1 hotel in Englos, where they were able to spend three nights. This Friday 8, four days after the evacuation, “all the families are once again without emergency housing or viable housing. They are in even more unsanitary places than the one they left,” deplores Dominique Plancke, representative of the Collectif Solidarité Roms et Gens du voyage.

The slum of La Poterne, inhabited for three years by more than 70 people, had already been emptied following punch actions that began in May. In order to evacuate the remaining people, a prefectural decree issued on June 27 required them to leave the premises within 24 hours. An approach which had provoked an appeal by the Collectif Solidarité Roma, which was finally rejected by the Administrative Court on Friday 1 July. On the day of the evacuation, the Prefect of the North invoked in a press release “serious and imminent dangers to which the occupants were exposed, due to the presence of the railway […]dangerous electrical connections and sanitary conditions posing a risk of fatal accident”.

A justification that Dominique Plancke still does not understand: “The TGV, the Deûle… Yes, but it had been three years. What was the urgency all of a sudden?”he asks, before mentioning, as a potential explanation, the strategy often used which consists in waiting for the end of the winter break and the school holidays to carry out expulsions. “We were surprised by the haste of the prefecture to pretend to discover the problem when it had been there for three years”, abounds Maître Norbert Clément, lawyer who represented the Roma Solidarity Collective during the court hearing.

While recognizing the insalubrity of this slum, Dominique Plancke affirms it: “We don’t want people to stay in those conditions, but deportation can be done by respecting them, and it didn’t.” In addition to the temporality, he also denounces the lack of dialogue with the people concerned and the actors involved in the field, who discovered via the prefectural decree that an expulsion was planned within 24 hours. “When we deport someone we give them the means to defend themselves and the time to leave, or else human dignity consists in putting people back on the street after three nights in a hotel”, ironically Maître Norbert Clément, a lawyer who represented the Roma Solidarity Collective during the hearing. Especially since the families concerned only learned once they arrived at the hotel that after this period, they would have no other accommodation solutions.

It is this type of so-called expulsion “dried”that is to say without a proposal for rehousing with a long-term vision, which denounces precisely the Roma Solidarity Collective. Indeed, it is difficult in these conditions to continue working, to go to school or to find permanent housing. “People who were in a precarious situation are being put in even more precarious and unworthy situations than before,” denounces Dominique Plancke. Among the members of the remaining families, the children go to school, and two men are employed, but this quick evacuation constitutes a risk for their employment. “There is a situation and people on the ground, we must take human lives into account by not making their lives even more difficult”, adds Maître Norbert Clément, lawyer specializing in foreigners’ rights.

In view of the procedure, both believe that the government instruction of January 2018, which organizes and supervises the clearance of slums, has not been respected. On the official government website, l’instruction in question mentions “global management, taking place over time from the installation of the camp until its disappearance” with the aim of pursuing a policy “both human and demanding in terms of respect for the law”. On the ground, the actors involved note the opposite. Results ? The problem is not resolved at its source, as Dominique Plancke reminds us: “The remaining fifty people are in the wild. they did not evaporate”. According to the governmenta shantytown is nevertheless “considered to be absorbed when a permanent solution in housing or accommodation is put in place for 66% of the inhabitants of the site.”

This is also what the representative of the prefect had put forward during the hearing, in order to justify the evacuation. For Dominique Plancke, “there was deception in explaining to the judge that there was no questioning of the fundamental freedom of the right to accommodation”. Contacted by telephone, the Integrated Reception and Orientation Service (SIAO) of Lille, under the responsibility of the prefect and his services, indicated that they had not taken charge of these families. No comment either from the town hall or the prefecture, also contacted, apart from a reference to the press release of the day of the evacuation.

“From a procedural point of view, it was neither done nor to be done. The procedure was flawed”, regrets Maître Norbert Clément. Indeed, the request for eviction is normally made by the owner of the land or the municipalities, but here, it is the prefect who is responsible for it. He evokes, to explain it, the fact that the evacuated shantytown is situated between two municipalities, complicating the procedures for the towns concerned. However, the lawyer is without appeal: the prefect cannot replace the town hall. “It was also the first time that a prefectural decree was used in this type of measure”specifies Dominique Plancke.

According to the press release from the Collectif Solidarité Roma, this way of doing things nevertheless responds to “a stubborn desire to make the ‘Roma problem’ disappear. Unfortunate and regrettable policy applied by the Prefect of the Region since his arrival in Lille”, can you read there. In a reportthe Romeurope National Human Rights Collective, which brings together 50 associations and collectives, abounds: “L’application […] is subject to very variable interpretations depending on the region and the people in charge of it”. To date, Lille would have around 1,100 people currently living on 96 sites, including shanty towns and squats.

–