Earlier this week the Metro reported on a teenager in France suing the owners of a swimming pool after a botched dive into it left him paralysed.
The 18-year-old’s case might sound reasonable until you learn he had actually been pool squatting at the time.
If you Google the term ’pool squatting’ you’ll be offered a range of water based fitness tips and videos on firming up your thighs.
But in this case it actually means using a swimming pool without permission and the phenomenon is reportedly a big problem in France, even being part of a social media ‘challenge’.
In the latest case, the young man and his friends had broken into an apartment block in Toulouse in southern France and illegally gained accessed to a stranger’s pool.
After paralysing himself when a dive went wrong, he took the apartment’smanagement company to court over accusations of negligence.
According to one French lawyer, if damage has occurred on someone’s property and this damage causes someone to hurt themself, the owners of the property are liable, even if the injured person was trespassing.
The owners, who said the case had left them ‘completely at a loss’, explained that the pool has been broken into by pool squatters many times since it was installed six years ago.
Another Toulouse resident called Patricia told La Dépêche newspaper her pool had also been broken into and used by squatters several times.
She said: ‘They cut our liner with a cutter two years ago. It cost us 14,000 euros (£12,000).’
And a further resident said it was common for groups of eight to ten people to take over a pool and threaten people when they’re asked to leave.
One owner was beaten up when he told some squatters to go, they added
Southern France, with its warmer temperatures, has reportedly been hit the wort by pool squatters.
According to Le Figaro, a couple in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon recently returned home from a night out to find another couple in the pool, who then drew a knife on the pair.
Meanwhile, a public swimming pool in Saint-Lys was broken into by a group of young people.
A salesperson at a swimming pool business near Clermont-Ferrand said they’ve had a number of break ins.
‘The squatters come in the evening when we have left. Neighbours call the police, who often arrive too late. Sometimes, they leave all sorts of rubbish,’ the Piscines Détente employee said.
A Toulouse platform called, Allô Toulouse, where residents can report various disturbances, has had 200 complaints about pool ‘squatting’ over the past three months, reports English speaking news site Connexion France.
According to the Guide-piscine.fr website, which offers pool installation advice, in summer there are 10 to 15 calls to police each day in France, which is home to more than three million private swimming pools.
The website says that residents tend to call police when they notice a break in but often don’t realise that ‘authorities’ power is essentially quite limited’.
According to French law, police can only intervene when individuals are’hindering the residents’ access and movement,’ ‘preventing security systems from working properly’ or ‘disturbing the peace of the environs’, and only the first two are punishable offences.
With a cooler climate and fewer outdoor swimming pools, the UK doesn’t, unsurprisingly, have a big pool squatting problem.
However, for anyone who does trespass onto another person’s land and fails to leave when asked or causes damage to someone’s property they could be charged with a criminal offence, according to the Crown Prosecution Service.
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