On Tuesday 22nd November, Annick, a volunteer with Fraternité  Migrants in the bassin mineur 62 in the north of France, was arrested at home at 6am in front of her two children. Her “crime” was to “help a person in danger”, and for this she was held in custody at the commissariat de Lille. Last week a support committee was established for her, backed by Amnesty International and the Ligue des droits des hommes.

To coincide with International Migrants Day on 18/12/11, there will be several demos across France. The Pas de Calais collective “d’ailleurs nous sommes d’ici ” has called for a day of denounciation of the  centre de rétention of Coquelles (Calais) on 17th December. On 18th December there will be a march from 3pm at Belleville metro in Paris.

Two undocumented Egyptians were killed around 1am on Thursday 17th November on the A16 near Dunkerque when a Dutch HGV drove into the back of the car they were traveling in. The driver and the front seat passenger of the car, assumed to people traffickers, fled the scene, while the three other passengers, also undocumented Egyptians, were picked up on the roadside by the authorities. Breath tests on the HGV driver were negative.

Yesterday evening the Maison des Roms in the 20th arrondissement of Paris – a warehouse owned by the Mairie de Paris which has been squatted for almost a year by around 100 Roma including children and elderly people – was burned down after a firebomb attack. Fortunately there were no fatalities; one passer-by was taken to hospital.

The attack came two days after a demonstration in the neighbourhood where some demonstrators proclaimed “we are going to burn everything!”. Le Collectif contre la xénophobie has denounced the attack and demanded that the authorities make every effort to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

On Monday 5th October around 30 people demonstrated outside the office of the Paf (border police) in Cherbourg to protest against the deportation of an Afghan man to Slovenia. The following day there were a demo outside the préfecture de Caen aganst the deportation of another Afghan male to Hungary. Sadly both deportations went ahead.

La Cimade report that yesterday a detainee attempted to hang himself at the CRA (detention centre) of Nimes. The charity says that they have witnessed an increase in acts of desperation and despair by the detainees, following the introduction of the new Besson law which has increased the maximum permitted stay in detention to 45 days.

A month after the decision of the conseil general of Seine-Saint-Denis (north-east of Paris) to stop housing unaccompanied minors, citing lack of funds, dozens of teenagers are sleeping rough, reports 20minutes.fr. The president of the tribunal pour enfants de Bobigny has made an appeal to the department’s residents to house the youngsters; meanwhile employers of the tribunal have been collecting funds to pay for breakfast for them.

This morning, Wednesday 28th September, six “Arab spring” migrants,four Tunisians and two Egyptians, died in a fire at the squat in the Parisian suburb of Pantin where they had lived for several months.
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, who visited the scene of the fire, blamed the deaths on “networks of illegal immigration”. SOS SOUTIEN Ô SANS PAPIERS said that Gueant and Christian Lambeth, préfet of Seine-Saint-Denis, had “blood on their hands”.

On Monday 19th September 8 detainees escaped from bâtiment 3 of Vincennes detention centre (CRA) near Paris. On Thursday 23rd September detainees from the adjacent detention centre, CRA 2, refused to return to their cells, moved their mattresses outside and begun a hunger strike. Several of the detainees had recently been transferred from Bobigny CRA  where disorder had taken place following several suicide attempts by fellow detainees.