2023-10-31 23:42:05
A shortage with devastating consequences. The Defender of Rights, Claire Hédon, affirmed that “the water crisis aggravates already present difficulties” in Mayotte, this Tuesday during a trip to the poorest department in France, located in the Indian Ocean.
“The water crisis aggravates already present difficulties and it can aggravate them further,” she declared during a press briefing in Mamoudzou, recalling that “access to water is a fundamental right », for vulnerable families, including those in an irregular situation.
The “right of access to water”
The visit of the Defender of Rights to this territory comes in a context of exceptional drought which leads to water cuts of more than 48 hours, twice a week, for those who have running water in their homes. But for residents of the island’s many informal settlements who get their water from standpipes, the situation has gotten even worse.
Asked about the dissuasive presence of the police stationed at these terminals, Claire Hédon declared having “already heard” and having “already alerted about it” because “this is contrary to the right of access to water “.
Another concern: access to bottled water, distribution of which is supposed to be extended to all audiences from mid-November. “If you have to prove on the basis of documents that you live in a particular municipality to benefit from a distribution, I have no doubt that this will exclude the most precarious. Whether they are in an irregular situation or not, these people do not always have the means to prove a place of residence,” underlined Claire Hédon.
A report published later
She was also concerned about the apprehension of part of the undocumented population, dissuaded from going to the distributions for fear of a police check on the way. “We are aware of this issue. We are warning about this. The prefecture tells us that there are no controls in these places. It’s difficult to know who knows what and I have no accusation to make,” she said.
Claire Hédon also insisted on the difficulties of access to rights, social benefits, and allowances for the inhabitants of the island. “We have complaints from retirees who are unable to receive their pension and remain without income for six months, a year, eighteen months… However, these people are currently forced to buy bottles of water,” she laments.
The cause of these administrative dysfunctions, according to her, often lies in “a complicated professional path that is sometimes hard to trace”. Claire Hédon qualifies
also “massive” the non-recourse to the RSA for the most vulnerable groups. “It needs to be evaluated further. Today, we estimate that 4,200 or 4,300 individuals use it,” she says. So many observations which will be the subject of a report published later.
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