In France, the right to asylum was introduced in the Constitution of 1793: "the French people shall give asylum to foreigners banished from their homeland for the cause of freedom"; and in the preamble of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946: "Any person persecuted because of his or her action in favor of freedom has the right to asylum within the territories of the [French] Republic." [1] There are three forms of protection: refugee status, so-called "subsidiary" protection, [2] and stateless status, the choice of which is made by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (hereafter OFPRA; Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides) under the supervision of the National Court of Asylum (hereafter CNDA; Cour Nationale du Droit d’Asile).
Internationally, the Geneva Convention of July 28, 1951, guarantees refugee status to anyone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." The European directive of June 26, 2013, on the other hand, states that "standards should be adopted for the reception of applicants which are sufficient to guarantee them a dignified standard of living and comparable living conditions in all Member States" (Art. 11).
The French law transposing this directive of July 29, 2015, relating to the reform of the right to asylum, recalls that the duty to protect is based on four principles: extended protection, an impartial examination of the asylum application, a right to remain on the territory and "dignified reception conditions throughout the examination". However, the reorganization of the "first reception" in 2015 [3] introduced a modification of the "Asylum Platforms" [4] and the principle of a public contract to select the service providers, with a mainly budgetary logic. These changes led to the overcrowding of support structures and a disengagement in the reception of applicants, whose numbers increased rapidly from 2015 onwards, giving rise to what the media and authorities described as a "refugee crisis", but which in reality is akin to a "hospitality crisis" (Robertson 2019) on a national and European scale.
Reactivated in 2015 around the idea of "unconditional reception," the Hospitalité network [5] brought together some twenty associations, activists and volunteers within the Asylum Observatory during the summer of 2017. This shared concern to document the material conditions of reception of asylum seekers in the city of Marseille is part of a struggle for visibility: "Being from elsewhere makes you a screen of strangeness. Human savagery is there: in this possibility of erasing the other from the field of the perceptible" (Bertomeu 2006, p. 86).
Sixty testimonies [6] were thus collected between 2017 and 2018, in the premises of the Cimade, the association SOS Voyageurs, within the collective Isolated Foreign Minors (MIE) and the unisex collective Parastoo [7]. The excerpts quoted in this article come from the accounts of people in exile and actors involved in their specific fields of intervention (general reception under ordinary law, health, foreigners’ rights, French courses, accommodation, integration). Our observations depict an idle daily life of waiting and wandering (1), against a background of destitution and deprivation (2), leading to an increase in psycho-social damage and risks for adults and, even more so, for children (3).
At the risk of the exodus and at the gates of asylum, the testimonies collected in Marseille depict the lack of support systems for people, the "material conditions of reception" and the absence of human consideration during the long and uncertain asylum procedure. We wanted to make visible these ordinary experiences of asylum because, paradoxically, in the heart of the Phocaean city "the too close is inaccessible, the too familiar is unknown, the too visible is unseen" (Filliot 2014, p. 8).
Waiting, wandering and neglect
In January 2018, in the département (county) of Bouches-du-Rhône, which includes Marseille, 5,808 adults and children, mainly from Afghanistan, Albania, Georgia, Guinea and Ivory Coast [8], were awaiting referral to the DNA (Dispositif National Asile [9]), including 2,500 single men. [10] The applicant witnesses met by the Marseille Asylum Observatory (OAM) come mainly from Afghanistan, followed by West African countries, then Syria, Russia, Kosovo and Albania, with an overrepresentation of young men (20-30 years old), as illustrated by the data below (Figure 1).
Key to pie chart: Families (11); Isolated women (2); Single women with children (2); Pregnant women (1); Unaccompanied minors (2); Isolated men (19). Charts by Assaf Dahdah and Béatrice Mésini.
Historically, Marseille has been a privileged place for foreigners to enter the country, in particular because of its port function (Temime, Echinard and Sayad 2007). Now, in addition to this function, there is also the function of administrative interface, since the unified administration for asylum seekers, known as the Guichet Unique pour les Demandeurs d’Asile (GUDA), is located there, which centralizes applications from the départements of Bouches-du-Rhône (around Marseille), Vaucluse (around Avignon), Alpes-de-Haute-Provence (around Digne-les-Bains) and Hautes-Alpes (around Gap). In 2018, 4,796 applications were thus registered locally, an increase of 20% compared to 2017.
Asylum seekers must first wait to pre-register their application at the PADA, which then gives them access to the GUDA, which brings together prefecture agents in charge of administrative registration and those of the French Office for Immigration and Integration (OFII), responsible for granting material reception conditions.
This wait for an appointment with the GUDA, which for the people interviewed averages 45 days, [11] means the absence of payment of the ADA (Allocation for asylum seekers) and residential wandering, between the squat and the street, in the absence of access to the HUDA (Emergency accommodation for asylum seekers). Arif, a 27-year-old Pakistani, wanders from place to place: "I go to the Platform, they tell me ’go to the Cimade’, I go to the Cimade, they tell me ’it’s not us, it’s the Platform’, I go to the prefecture, they tell me ’go to OFII’, I go to OFII and they don’t open the door. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work..."; [12] young Afghan Karim, 29 years old, who has been waiting for his appointment at the GUDA for nine months, expresses the same feeling: "You are ‘Dublined’ [13]: you are told you have no rights; you are ’normal’ [procedure]: you are told, you wait; you obtain status: you are told, now that you have refugee status, you don’t come here [OFII] anymore..." [14]
A loss of reference points and a deep discouragement result from this expectation, testify the young people met at the Manba association: [15] "And then you don’t know anything, what, you don’t understand anything because you don’t have any information, you are in an absolute precariousness because you don’t have any control over your life, you don’t have the right to work legally, to train yourself, to build yourself." [16]
Une perte de repères et un profond découragement résultent de cette attente, témoignent les jeunes rencontrés à l’association Manba : [17] " Et puis tu ne sais rien, quoi, tu ne comprends rien parce que tu n’as aucune information, tu es dans une précarité absolue parce que tu n’as aucun contrôle sur ta vie, tu n’as pas le droit de travailler légalement, de te former, de te construire. " [18]
Neglect is fostered by the fragmentation of social support structures, which forces asylum seekers to travel from agency to agency, with the risk that none will be in fine responsible for concrete support. This "institutional factory of wandering" (Chobeaux 2016) consequently forces volunteers to respond to urgent needs. On this particular morning, when the Cimade office had registered forty-three applications, the volunteer was torn between anger and exasperation: "Before, we were really doing asylum (appeals). Now we do everything. Everything that the French state does not do for access to food or health... It’s nonsense!" [19]
Denial and food deprivation
When the state is unable to offer an accommodation solution to asylum seekers, it must pay them a financial allowance "sufficient" to enable them to secure housing on the private rental market. However, the additional amount of 4.20 euros, provided for in Article 2 of the decree of October 21, 2015 on the asylum seeker’s allowance, [20] was annulled in December 2016 by the Council of State, due to the fact that it was insufficient to access housing. [21] The 2019 Finance Bill puts a figure of 30 million euros on the revaluation of the additional amount paid to unhoused persons by two euros per day. [22]
Clearly, the amount of the allowance, which is progressive according to the composition of the family (from 6.80 euros for one person to 17 euros for four), is insufficient to cover all daily needs (food, hygiene, transportation, clothing, etc.). The search for food becomes central in the descriptions of a daily life characterized by lack and deprivation. Opened in 1996, the only NOGA social restaurant in Marseille serves several hundred meals a day on the Cours Julien, in the heart of the city, which is no longer sufficient to meet the needs. So the registration services were advised not to report this address anymore. Of Syrian origin, Murat, 21, who arrived in Marseille in May 2017 with his wife Sara and their 2-year-old son, explains that they were never informed of its existence: "For more than three months [since our arrival], we didn’t have any help for accommodation, nor to go and eat." [23]
After eighteen years of living and working in Tripoli as a cook for a large group, Malik, a Moroccan national, arrived by boat with his wife and son on August 27, 2017 in Marseille. The family has been sleeping in a park for several nights after the end of the ten-day care by the 115. The lack of meals, food and shelter means they have to work out solutions from day to day: "We have no money, we have to fend for ourselves. A bakery agreed to give us bread in the evening, in Septèmes-les-Vallons, next to the Héco hotel. At Saint-Charles station [the city’s main railway station], in the evening at 9:00 p.m., I go to get food from the truck [24] which gives a small meal." [25] It was the same for Jamal, who was refused to stay in the place at the end of the ten days of shelter: "On the phone, I said that I had a sick child, a one and a half year old baby, a two and a half year old son, and that my wife was eight months pregnant, but they refused anyway, they leave families like that, outside. We slept on the street for five days." [26] Certainly, asylum appears to be a dissuasive right "under duress," which helps to "discourage" more than to protect (Ribémont 2018).
The volunteers of SOS Voyageurs, powerless in the face of the magnitude of the needs, oppose their "consideration" to the initial movement of flabbergasting, offering a few moments of comfort and respite: "That is to say, attention, thoughtfulness, consideration, esteem, and consequently the reopening of a relationship, a proximity, a possibility" (Macé 2017, p. 23). Ultimately, it is individual initiatives and collective solidarities that parent to the necessities and emergencies, substituting for failing institutions, corroborates Jamal: "The private people who saw us and that we met, helped us much more than the French state!" [27]
Infringements and psychosocial risks
According to Article 17 of the 2013 EU Directive, EU Member States "shall ensure that measures relating to material reception conditions provide applicants with an adequate standard of living which guarantees their subsistence and protects their physical and mental health." However, the criteria for prioritizing accommodation requests have become progressively stricter: in 2004, families with minor children were considered to be in an exceptional situation; in 2016, those with children under 10 years of age and women who were more than six months pregnant, and in 2018, those with children under 3 years of age, women who were more than eight months pregnant with a medical certificate, victims of trafficking and/or domestic violence, and people with serious documented health problems.
The law defines as vulnerable people who are not able to "properly exercise their rights and freedoms", and/or who are not able to "exercise the attributes of personality" (Roux-Demare 2019). Despite the enshrinement of the right to asylum, people do not think of themselves as "subjects of the law," laments Véronique, a social worker at the Osiris care center: "Many of the people we receive have simply given up on the right. They have tried several times to get access to CMU [full, free medical cover], to get access to ADA [asylum seeker’s allowance], to accommodation, they have exhausted themselves before giving up completely." [28] This care center has set up a discussion group in the Dari and Pashto languages, in which everyone can talk about their experience, the difficulties linked to their arrival in France and their journey, particularly in the asylum application, if they wish. The deprivations endured at the end of trying journeys come, according to her, to "contaminate the therapeutic space": "By putting these people on the bangs of the law, or in situations of theoretical rights, we come to reactivate, to reinforce the violence and trauma suffered in the country of origin." [29]
In addition, an activist from the Manba self-help group, insists on the seriousness of the psychic damage on people: "There are people that I have seen, in two years, become completely crazy, completely lose contact with reality." [30] The vulnerability here is that of a subject "locked into their difficulties in maintaining themselves in existence," who also experiences being "exposed to others" (Pierron 2019, p. 578). Other work confirms that the prevalence of severe psychotraumatic disorders correlates with the treatment that host countries give to these exiles (Pestre 2014).
Moreover, given the shortage of reception facilities, the time of the asylum application is "caught between processes of assignment and disengagement" (Felder 2009, p. 120). Thus, for 15,000 homeless people counted by the National Federation of Solidarity Actors, there were only 2,391 permanent places to carry out sheltering in Marseille in 2017. To denounce the inadequacy of this care, and after several requests to the Bouches-du-Rhône Departmental Council remained unanswered, the collective Soutien Migrants13-el Manba, with the Cimade, RESF, Syndicat des avocats de France, Emmaus, Médecins du Monde, sheltered 40 minors in St. Ferréol’s church, in the Old Port, on November 21, 2017.
Despite these shortcomings, the evacuations of squats housing asylum seekers, refugees and homeless people continued in 2018: rue Mazagran on January 30, tower H in Kallisté Park on February 12, the Raccoon squat on April 8 and Massena barracks on October 8. On December 18, 2018, a large building belonging to the diocese of Marseille was occupied by more than 240 people, including 80 minors and about 40 families with children. An open letter was co-signed by the MIE 13 collective, organizations and solidaires, "to alert once again their political will to override their obligations to protect children and accommodate asylum seekers." [31]
Reception, or illegal action by the French state?
This case study shows the ambivalence of French and European policies, torn between the discourse of reception and respect for dignity on the one hand, and the implementation of dissuasive and precarious measures on the other. Instead of reception and shelter, removal policies are applied, which aim to "put an end to the accommodation of rejected asylum seekers who are unduly present" and to "effectively remove them": "36,800 people are expected to quickly leave the accommodation they have been provided (either towards housing or an integration scheme, or with a view to a Dublin transfer, or removal)". [32] The suspicion strengthened controls on asylum seekers "filtered, sorted, classified" throughout the asylum process according to their "pre-applicant," "Dublined," and "vulnerable persons" statuses (Teitgen-Colly 2019).
What legal term should be applied to the ordinary failings and "extraordinary" infringements described in the stories? The interim relief judge of the Marseille administrative court considered that the deprivation of decent reception conditions constituted "a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of the constitutional right to asylum". Considering that the emergency was characterized because of "the deprivations endured" and "health problems," the December 13, 2018, judgment enjoins the OFII to grant "material reception conditions" to two parents and three children "who have left Syria owing to persecution." [33]
The whole point of the collective work Asylum in Exile, from which this article stems, is to show the (extra)ordinary experience of the exiles and of the reception professionals who every day deal with local authorities’ dereliction of duty, and the budgetary and human under-resourcing in the procedural implementation of this fundamental right.
In criminal law, vulnerability, which is a prerequisite or a constitutive element of the offence against "victims in a situation of weakness", is also an aggravating circumstance of the sentence. Thus, what offenses could be cited when authorities tasked with specific functions, endowed with the powers and means to take action, neglect persons who are "unable to protect themselves" [34] and fail to "help persons in danger or in peril", [35] in perfect contradiction of (inter)national commitments regarding asylum?
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