Italian police break up sit-in staged on French border
Police in Italy have broken up a protest sit-in by some 200 migrants at a border crossing with France.
Italian police moved in on the protesters after about a dozen French police officers refused to let the migrants cross the border.
AFP reported that Italian police, who were wearing riot gear, forced the migrants to go toward the town of Ventimiglia; however, about fifty men resisted the police and took refuge among the rocks on the roadside.
The group of migrants, who were from Africa, lacked legal documentation, according to the French prefect in the region, Adolphe Colrat. He said he did not allow them to cross into France due to the European Union ( EU) immigration regulations.
The protesters resisted the police efforts to turn them back, with one of them saying, “We risked our lives crossing the Mediterranean. It was hard.”
Some of the migrants reportedly wanted to go to France, while others aimed to go Switzerland, Germany and the UK via France.
An Italian Red Cross spokesman said the authorities were still undecided whether to establish a camp for the migrants in Ventimiglia or not.
Ventimiglia is an Italian town about five kilometers (three miles) away from the French border.
Last week, the United Nations (UN) reported that 103,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe so far this year.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says that, since the beginning of 2015, some 54,000 migrants have reached the shores of Italy, 48,000 have reached Greece, 920 migrants have landed in Spain and 91 in Malta.
The UNHCR described the situation as a “dramatic increase” in the number of migrants.
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