Charles Luylier with AFP / Photo credits: Loic Venance/AFP 7:33 a.m., February 29, 2024

After being expelled from a squat at Paul-Sabatier University in Toulouse, dozens of young migrants settled in the Saint-Sernin gymnasium last Saturday.

The administrative court orders their expulsion this Wednesday “without delay”.

A judge ordered Wednesday that dozens of migrants, who settled in a gymnasium in Toulouse after being evicted from a university building they had occupied for more than a year, also leave this site, after a complaint from the city ​​hall.

The migrants, including some minors, had settled in the Saint-Sernin gymnasium on Saturday, in the city center, after being expelled the day before from a building at Paul-Sabatier University, where there were more than 200 of them. house since December 2022.

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“Vacate the premises without delay”

The city of Toulouse then announced its intention to file a complaint and filed an eviction order on Monday.

In his decision, the judge "orders all occupants without rights or titles of the Saint-Sernin gymnasium (...) to vacate the premises without delay".

To justify his decision, he indicated that he considered "that the occupation in question was an obstacle to the functioning of the public education service and to the development of sports and physical education activities".

Mayor Jean-Luc Moudenc (DVD) immediately welcomed the decision and announced on X that he had contacted "the prefect to ask him to organize the evacuation of the Saint-Sernin municipal gymnasium as quickly as possible".

"It is a gymnasium which offers nearly 500 weekly sports slots. It welcomes nearly 4,000 high school students, some of whom are in their final year and take the Baccalaureate at the end of the year. There is no need to establish a squat in a gymnasium", declared Emilion Esnault, deputy mayor and responsible for security and good maintenance of public spaces.

"I find it abnormal. We're going to go into the street. It's very cold and we're humans too. We can't sleep outside in the winter," reported André, a 16-year-old Guinean, at the microphone of Europe 1. There are more than a hundred migrants in this gymnasium and most of them are minors, according to the organizations supporting them.