Police have moved more than 2,000 refugees and migrants off the streets of Paris, where they had been sleeping rough for weeks in squalid and insanitary conditions.

Riot officers watched the refugees as they were bussed to temporary shelters in school gymnasiums on Friday morning. Hundreds of refugees and migrants had arrived in the Porte de la Chapelle area of northern Paris, sleeping under road bridges and on the side of the road with almost no access to water, sanitation and food, outside Paris’s new aid centre for asylum seekers that was opened in November. The operation to move them began at dawn and took place calmly. Groups of men and women from countries including Afghanistan and Eritrea – some only with small rucksacks or plastic bags of belongings – were sent on to buses and driven out of Paris.

It was the 34th police removal of large numbers of refugees and migrants sleeping rough in the French capital since 2015. Aid workers warned that France needed to establish an efficient long-term strategy for processing and housing asylum seekers in decent conditions rather than constantly taking emergency action at the last minute.(Theguardian)…[+]