Across Europe, the rollback of social protections combined with an unprecedented crisis leads to the development of survival practices: living in squats, surviving on begging or collecting recyclable waste.
These distressing situations are plagued by harsher legislation and a policing approach to poverty: banning begging, making sleeping outside a crime, forced labor camps, prohibition of almsgiving, destruction of dwellings, police harassment of targeted vulnerable groups: Roma, sex workers, drug addicts… The legal irresponsibility of the mentally ill is increasingly less recognized by the courts, etc.
In France, anti-begging decrees are multiplying, the spontaneous parking of travelers has become a crime, sex workers are hunted down, squats are sometimes evicted without legal proceedings, Roma are chased, foreign children are detained in administrative detention centers, in violation of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights. The police push the homeless to the outskirts of urban centers, and checks and fines are on the rise.
European solidarity organizations are organizing a front of resistance through a simultaneous legal guerrilla across Europe, with the support of volunteer lawyers.
But more fundamentally, this issue needs to be present in public debate, in society: poverty is not a matter for the police, but for solidarity!
