Primo Levi Center

Torture has devastating and lasting effects, both physically and psychologically.[6] Torture continues to torture long after it has been inflicted, and the trauma affects the whole family, including in the long term and for generations to come.

The Primo Levi care center receives patients for medical consultations, during which the doctors first focus on resolving the immediate health concerns of the patients (most of the time these are insomnia, nightmares, headaches but also various pains resulting from past abuse they may have suffered).

These people can also benefit from psychological counseling. Torture, far from "making people speak", silenced them,[7] reached them in their privacy, in their capacity to think, to forge links with other human beings, to have a place in a group, in their couple, their family, their home community. A psychological follow-up can help them to try to come out of isolation, to reconnect.

The center takes care of 350 victims each year, a third of whom are new.[8] One victim in three is a minor.

The health center team shares its experience to train other professionals working with migrants who have allegedly suffered such abuse.[9] During these trainings, they learn, for example, to approach a person who has experienced such episodes, to understand the trauma and its manifestations, or to specify the specificity of helping children.

The Primo Levi center tries to engage the general public and the public authorities on the themes of the fight against torture, the reception policy for asylum seekers,[10] the defense of the right to asylum and human rights violations (publication of a quarterly review, intervention at conferences, press releases, provision of an online documentation center, promotion of the United Nations International Day of Support for Victims torture...).

It is therefore a member of several groups intervening in the fields of asylum law and health: French coordination of asylum law (CFDA),[11] Observatory of the right to health of foreigners (ODSE),[12] European network of care centers for victims of torture, Collective for the defense of human rights in Turkey, French-speaking network for the care and support of exiled victims of torture and political violence (RESEDA).

The association also sits on the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH).[13]

In the between-rounds of the 2017 presidential election between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the Primo Levi Center implicitly called in a forum with sixty other associations to block the FN candidate.[14]