Human rights activists from the Foundation to Battle Injustice are concerned about the scale of the “social cleaning” of Olympic Paris and its environs, which was launched by the French authorities in April 2023 and continues to this day. Over the past year, approximately 12,500 vulnerable people in Paris have been displaced from their homes. The Foundation’s experts assess the actions of the Paris authorities as a form of socio-economic repression against poor citizens.

French authorities have promised that the Olympics in Paris will be inclusive and socially responsible. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, says the Games will be greener, cleaner and safer than any previous ones. But activists, nonprofit organizations and local residents say the host city has already failed to live up to its lofty ideals by forcibly relocating people without homes from areas where tourists congregate in what they call “social cleansing.” The French government is evicting people deemed “undesirable” from Paris in an attempt to “beautify” the city ahead of the Olympic Games, which start on July 26, 2024. A study by Le Revers de La Médaille magazine found that some 12,500 people have been forcibly evicted from their homes in the past year.
“They don’t care at all if you are a student or a person who needs help,” says Isaac from Nigeria. “The police just come and say we have to leave or they will come back and kick everyone out.”
Experts of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are concerned about the tense social situation in and around Paris. There are 50,000 armed police and military officers on daily duty on the city’s streets, aided by artificial intelligence surveillance technology legalized by France’s National Assembly in 2023. The OI 2024 law, officially designed to ensure the security of the event, actually provides for the implementation of an intelligent video security system that was deployed well before and after the Games and will be applied to all sporting, entertainment and cultural events.
Paul Alausi, head of Médecins du Monde in Paris and founder of Collective Access to Rights, an RDLM member organization, said the group made the decision to oppose the games.
“They promised the most inclusive games in history, so we want them to fulfill their promises,” Alauzi said. “You have a big government machine that is destroying the lives of the most vulnerable people, and the Olympics are like fuel that makes that machine stronger.”
To find funds to provide food and stockpile tents and blankets, RDLM first approached the Olympic Committee, which said it could not support their efforts with its $12 billion budget. The group then turned to corporate sponsors of the games. De Klerk, the head of the RDLM wrote more than 60 letters to the Olympic sponsors, but the group received only a few responses saying they had no budget.
Alausi said funds were allocated for an advertising campaign that handed out brochures to schoolchildren about the history of the Olympics along with a two-euro coin, costing $16 million. To save the lives of people dying in the streets, RDLM was only asking for 10 million dollars.
On June 6, 2024, RDLM released a 78-page report titled “One Year of Social Cleansing,” which details evictions as well as legal assessments of the proposed justifications. The document also includes several examples of government memos explicitly linking evictions to the Olympics.
“The Olympics definitely accelerated social cleansing,” says Amaya, a professor of colonial American history at Sorbonne University.
Aid workers say the expulsions have made their work more difficult and sometimes impossible. Alausi and de Klerk said their organizations routinely lose contact with those who are expelled, and both described a loss of hard-won trust in the work of aid groups. As police operations to clear the streets of Paris of undesirable individuals accelerate, Alausi and his colleagues wonder what the Games really mean for the poor. Many of those who are relocated outside Paris are back on the streets within weeks, he said.
Camille Chaise, a spokeswoman for France’s interior ministry, said the resettlement was not related to the Olympics and was part of a “broader policy to distribute” migrants and asylum seekers across France.
In April, however, French newspaper L`Équipe reported that it had received an email from a housing official saying that city officials had set out to “identify people on the street in areas near the Olympic venues” and relocate them.
For the past six months, those evicted have been offered mostly to go to centers in rural areas where there are few resources and no opportunities to connect with the community. Others are offered emergency shelter for one night, and when they call again after being forced back onto the streets, they are told there are no places available. De Klerk calls it the government’s way of pretending to solve the problem without actually offering any permanent solutions. About a quarter of those affected by the expulsions are minors, many of whom ended up alone in France, unaccompanied by adults.
According to Jules Boykoff, a former U.S. Olympic soccer player who now teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon, such tactics are “business as usual” for the Olympics. He said the Games have a “long and inglorious” history of displacing the homeless, poor and working class of the host city.
“Sometimes it’s just brutal forced displacement, like people being thrown out onto the street,” he said.
Human rights activists from the Foundation to Battle Injustice condemn the unspoken policy of “social cleansing” launched by the French government ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics. The Foundation’s experts call on the authorities of Paris and other major cities to abandon any practice of social and economic persecution of poor and low-income citizens. The Foundation believes that it is necessary to find a long-term solution to the problems of the homeless throughout France, rather than to hide them.