French police have been accused of more than 1,000 human rights violations against refugees, it has been reported.

Four humanitarian organisations published a report called ‘Police Violence in Calais: Abusive and Illegal Practices by Law Enforcement officers’, says that 972 incidents were recorded over the space of a year by aid workers who formed a human rights monitoring team.

One of the most serious allegations relates to January 25, 2018, when a 16-year-old Eritrean boy lost his eye, sense of smell and hearing in one ear after French riot police fired tear gas into a crowd of refugees during an eviction of their sleeping area in Calais.

In 2017, a black man called Théo arrived at a French emergency room on Feb. 2.

He accused two French police officers of raping him with batons during an arrest. The police officers claimed that the baton somehow inserted itself after his trousers accidentally fell down.

Theo was raped by French police

While noting that the violent encounter was “very serious,” the investigation by France’s national police force claimed that the incident was “not a rape” because of the “unintentional character” of the penetration.

Théo said that during the attack in which they pepper sprayed him, they called him ‘negro’ and ‘bitch’.

This new report states that the riot police fired “chemical agent grenades indiscriminately into a crowd of displaced people in [an] attempt to disperse them.”

The victim says that a rubber bullet gun was fired at him 10 to 15 metres away.

“The [riot police] fired tear gas from guns and filled the sky with smoke,” says a British volunteer who witnessed the incident. “I saw through the smoke a boy being carried by his friends, covered in blood. He had been hit in the eye and they had no way of getting him to hospital. His friends were crying; it was a group of minors and the boy himself was 16.”

At least 124 reports of physical violence by police officers against refugees were made to volunteers. One testimony from a 21-year-old Ethiopian male on October 29, 2018 says that he was beaten by police.

“They tried to break my arms,” he says. “They beat me too much.” He claims he later lost consciousness

A 13-year-old boy from Afghanistan, who had been sleeping on the streets, says that he was a victim of tear-gassing and beatings by French authorities.

One pregnant woman in April 2018 says she was prevented from returning to her tent to retrieve medication after an eviction. Some refugees who were the subject of an eviction on September 6, 2018, in Dunkirk allege that police tied them up with cables and drew numbers on their bodies.

A video, seen by Al Jazeera, supposedly taken inside one of the police stations shows a number of men with their hands bound with cable ties. The man who took the video says he was rounded up along with others by riot police and national police and was then taken to a police station, which he believes was in Lille. While there, he says he was bound with plastic cable ties.

Another video given to Al Jazeera taken on the same day as the September 6 eviction shows men on a bus being taken to a police station with cable ties around their wrists.

One of the refugees stated: “We’ve been detained for seven hours, maybe eight I’m not sure. They weren’t letting us out to go to the toilet. They actually put numbers behind our heads, on the neck so they can recognise us. So that’s how they were recognising us. They were calling one by one, taking information and fingerprints.”

A 27-year-old Kurdish man, who wishes to remain anonymous who was the subject of a separate eviction on October 23, says that he was taken to a Dunkirk police station and had his number written on his arm.

“A number, just like an animal you know, just like [an] animal. All of the countries all over the world, they put this just on the animal’s hand, why they put this?” he says.

It has also been alleged in testimony received by Al Jazeera that during an eviction on October 23 in Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk, a woman, who was eight months pregnant, fainted after witnessing her husband being struck by police.

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