Paris to build migrant camp

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo says Europe's current migration crisis is unacceptable and the French capital will build a camp to house hundreds of refugees.

Municipal authorities in Paris are set to build a camp to house several hundred refugees in the French capital.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said city services were looking for a site in the north of the city and that the camp could be built within two months, while criticising the dire living conditions for migrants who have fled to Europe.

Hidalgo cited as a model a migrant camp made up of modular cabins housing about 2500 people in Grand-Synthe on the northern French coast.

Opened in March, that camp is run by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.

"We cannot accept any longer the humanitarian situation, the sanitary situation that migrants have to put up with," Hidalgo told reporters, without elaborating.

It would be the first refugee camp in the Paris area.

France has been much less affected by the migrant crisis than, for example, neighbouring Germany, which has taken in more than a million migrants, many fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, since last summer.

However, thousands have transited France to reach the Channel in the hope of crossing to Britain.

Some 3900 migrants currently live in squalid conditions in a camp outside the port of Calais.


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Source: AAP



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