XII. Detention in Greece 

The Evros Region

Border Police Stations  

Migrants interviewed by Human Rights Watch who spoke about being arrested and detained in the Evros border region often said that the police did not fingerprint or register them, and also described abusive treatment and poor conditions in the police stations.[156]  Most of the people Human Rights Watch interviewed who had been detained in police stations in the Evros border region did not know the name of the place where they were detained and many were unclear about dates and other details.  This was particularly true for people who had made multiple attempts to enter Greece and who had been summarily returned and/or detained multiple times. 

One such account comes from the 28-year-old Iraqi man with scars from a bomb explosion, previously quoted, who was arrested and expelled in two unsuccessful attempts to enter Greece[157] and then detained again in each of three attempts to leave Greece from Patras. On his third, successful attempt to enter Greece, he walked for 15 days (actually only at night) and reached Thessaloniki.  He doesn't know where he was taken, but he describes it thus:

The Thessaloniki police arrested me and took me to a place called a camp, but it was really a jail.  I was held there for 35 days.  We kept it clean ourselves.  There were many nationalities there, a lot of Albanians.  Every room had 15 or 20 people.  There were a lot of rooms.  We stayed inside the whole time.  We never saw the sun in 35 days.  I was hungry.  There was not enough food to eat.  Those who had money could pay the guards to buy food from the outside.  Even the bought food was bad; the chicken still had blood in it. 

The guards were not good.  They shouted at us.  The guards spoke only Greek.  They didn't even speak English.  The only way they had to communicate was by beating us.  The only thing asked of me was where I came from.  I said I was Palestinian.  Nothing else.[158] 

A different 28-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad was arrested and held at two different police stations at Orestiada for a total of two weeks, where the police did not give him adequate blankets, clothing, or hot water.  He added, "The police treated us very badly.  They kicked the food, they insulted us.  They didn't beat us hard.  Sometimes they hit us with a baton.  Other guards would watch the hitting, it was the normal thing.  There were about 17 teenagers mixed in with the men."[159] 

A number of the migrants who told Human Rights Watch about being summarily expelled from Greece at the Evros River mentioned the police station at Soufli as the place where they would be held for a few days until a sufficient number were collected before the authorities took them to the border and summarily expelled them.[160]  Detainees described it as dark and dingy:  "Soufli was very bad," said a Turkoman Iraqi from Kirkuk.  "I stayed there for 20 days and didn't once see the sun.  We were only allowed one or two minutes to go to the toilet."[161]

In its assessment of detention conditions in 2007, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) found that conditions it visited in Greek border guard stations "were, in general, unacceptable even for short periods.  The cells at Isaakio and Neo Himoni had poor access to natural light and ventilation, and the detainees were provided with dirty blankets and slept on filthy mattresses on the floor.  The toilet facilities were dirty and, in some cases, out of order."  The CPT found "extreme overcrowding" and unsanitary conditions at the Kiprinos police station.  It noted, "Such conditions could easily be described as inhuman and degrading."[162]

The Kyprinou Facility in Fylakio  

Human Rights Watch was given a very controlled, guided tour of the Fylakio-Kyprinou detention facility.  All the detainees were forced to stand in the yard outside the building during the Human Rights Watch visit.  Human Rights Watch toured completely empty rooms.  They were clean and neat.  Each room had a copy of the five-language booklet "Basic Information for Asylum Seekers," sitting on a carefully made bed.  Although the detainees were made to stand out in the yard, it was a place completely without shade and also separated from volleyball and basketball courts, which stood empty.

Since we were not allowed to talk with detainees at Fylakio-Kyprinou, but only to tour an empty, freshly scrubbed building, Human Rights Watch cannot make a proper assessment of conditions there.  We note that the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) reported that Fylakio-Kyprinou does not comply with the standards proposed by the CPT:  "The new facility at Filakio consists of four large warehouse-type rooms with a proposed capacity of some 380 men, women, and children.  The four rooms are packed with bunk-beds and, at full capacity, each detainee would only have about 2 m2 of personal space…. To sum up, the design is not appropriate for the needs."[163]

We were able to interview former Fylakio-Kyprinou detainees, however, such as the 28-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad, who told us about his experience in the Orestiada police stations,[164] but who also spent three months in Fylakio-Kyprinou:

Fylakio was crowded.  There were about 360 people there.  We were sometimes allowed outside in the morning and the evening for about 10 to 15 minutes each time.  Some days we were not allowed outside at all.  There is a place for volleyball and basketball, but I never played either in the three months I was there.  I never watched TV.  I didn't know they had a TV.  I never had any visitors.  We would eat in the same place we slept.  There was no place to sit, except on the bed.[165]

Hitting and slapping by guards appears to be the norm, in part because of the lack of other means of communication (or the will to try to communicate with the detainees through other means).  This same former detainee continued:

The guards at Fylakio treated us the same as at the police station, mostly slapping and pushing us.  If there was a fight or a problem between the detainees, the police would beat us very hard.  They would beat us to punish us.  Another form of punishment was to prevent us from calling our families or denying us food.[166]

The gap between guards and detainees was not only exacerbated by the inability to communicate verbally, but also by various forms of treatment that made the detainees feel as though they were being treated like animals.  For example, this same detainee observed, "Whenever the guards came into the room, they would wear a mask and plastic gloves to protect them from germs."[167]

Venna [168]  

Human Rights Watch did not have permission to visit Venna, but visited the facility anyway.  We were able to conduct half of one interview in a room used by the guards before the authorities checked with their superiors and stopped the interview.  Before being asked to leave, Human Rights Watch observed that the facility looks like an old warehouse divided into smaller rooms, each holding 30 to 35 persons.  Each room has a small window about 80 by 40 cm.  The facility was dark and very hot with poor air circulation and many of the detainees were sitting only in their underwear.   Before the authorities stopped the interview, Human Rights Watch was talking with a 16-year-old unaccompanied boy from Afghanistan who had been in the facility for two months and 10 days. Aside from some biographical information about the death of his parents in Afghanistan, he was only able to say, "This is not a good place.  I am sick.  For one month, nobody has taken care of me."[169]

Human Rights Watch was able to interview a number of former detainees from the Venna detention facility.[170]  A 28-year-old Iraqi man from Baghdad was held in the Venna facility for three months in 2007 after being caught trying to leave Greece at the Patras port.   He said that most of the detainees at Venna were caught at Patras and were being held for the maximum three-month period, which he interpreted as punishment for being caught at Patras.  He said of Venna:

It was very dirty.  The mattresses, the blankets were dirty.  The food was dirty.  There were hairs in the food.  They took a sack of my belongings when I arrived and never gave it back to me.  Every three or four days they would take us outside for one hour.  The telephones were only outside-two telephones for 30 to 40 people at a time.  There was no other time we could use the phones.[171] 

A 33-year-old man from Baghdad who spent three months in Venna from November 2007 until January 2008 told Human Rights Watch how the authorities prepare before the visit of a monitoring delegation:

Some people from an organization came to visit Venna.  Before they arrived, the authorities ordered us to clean the place.  We had to paint the walls.  We cleaned everything.  We even painted the floor.  They changed all the dirty mattresses and blankets.  They gave us a bag of clean, second-hand clothes.  Then they put us outside when the delegation came to visit. A man with a beard came and photographed us, but they were not allowed to talk with us.  This happened after I was there for about one month.[172]

The CPT delegation visited Venna in February 2007, and noted that "the conditions had not improved since the 2005 visit."[173]

Peplos

At the time of the Human Rights Watch visit the Peplos facility had been recently closed for renovations (and by one unconfirmed account was reported as being permanently closed[174]).  But Human Rights Watch heard relatively recent accounts of conditions there, such as this testimony about conditions in the winter of 2007:

The police caught us at Soufli.  They screamed at us, made us lie on the ground, and took our phones.  They took us to Peplos where we were held for three days.  It was really dirty, disgusting.  Even the blankets were filthy.  I saw the year 1997 written on a tag on a blanket.  The bed was made of cement.  There were 80 or 90 of us in a very small room.  The toilet was on the side of the room with no barrier.  There was no air circulation to take the smell of the toilet outside.  I never saw a nurse or a doctor.  People who were sick were told they would be released soon.  We had no interview.  No fingerprints.[175]

The Greek Islands [176]

Samos -- Old and New

The Samos facility that Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour is an enormous improvement over the old facility that was in operation until November 2007. Human Rights Watch observed a clean facility with laundry machines, good toilets and showers, a basketball court, a dining hall, and a playground for children.  The barracks house like-nationality groups and while they still are crowded, detainees can go in and out of the barracks during the day.  Although Human Rights Watch was not allowed to talk privately with detainees at the new Samos facility, the detainees were not kept as far apart from us as at Fylakio-Kyprinou nor did they make the same desperate and negative sign language as they did at our visit to the Fylakio-Kyprinou facility.  The relatively good conditions in the Samos facility were largely confirmed (with the exception of accounts of abuse by facility staff) in interviews with former detainees.[177]  Human Rights Watch interviewed a 14-year-old unaccompanied Afghan boy who said that although unaccompanied children were mixed with adults, (a serious problem) conditions on the whole were good:

The camp was new.  Children with women were in one room.  I was in another room together with the adults.  I stayed there for two weeks.  Each person had a blanket, pillows, and everything and we got three meals a day.  The food was varied and I was happy with it.[178]

Detainees held in the old Samos facility described it quite differently.[179]  The old Samos facility was notorious, described by a European Parliament delegation in July 2007 as "squalid, deplorable and inhuman."[180]  A 30-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad described the old Samos facility: "It was a very dirty place.  I was held there for 15 days.  It had a very dirty toilet.  There was no hot water.  You couldn't bathe.  Eighty of us were closed in a very small dirty room.  We were afraid of the guards.  They would beat us."[181] 

A 21-year-old Iraqi Kurd from Kirkuk who has been detained in Greece, Turkey, and northern Iraq often drew comparisons in detention standards among the three countries.  Of the old Samos facility, he said:

The jails in Turkey were cleaner than the one in Samos.  There were about 400 people jammed into Samos.  They called it a "camp," but it was really a jail.  There were no separate rooms, just many people in a big hall.  Going to the toilet, you would step on people.  You had to crawl over people to go to the toilet.  People were even sleeping there, it was so crowded.  The guards at Samos were not good, but they treated us better than the Turkish police.[182]

Despite the obvious improvement in conditions between the old and new facilities on Samos, detainees in the new facility alleged that certain members of the staff beat and abused them (though they often praised others for their kindness).[183]  Human Rights Watch visited the facility on Thursday, May 29.  On Tuesday of the same week the authorities released a "Rwandan" man whose arm was broken after detainees allege he was beaten by a guard.  The guard was new, and detainees did not know his name.  The incident occurred during "count," which is held on the basketball court periodically to line up and count the detainees, at which time they are often humiliated, slapped, and beaten.  A North African man also released that Tuesday, told Human Rights Watch:

Most of the problems are on the basketball court.  They made us sit down and stand up.  They would count and then count again, sometimes 10 times a day.  We sometimes waited around on the court two hours, and then they would call us back again.  People would get angry with the count and how they were being treated. Sometimes Yiorgos, a guy who cleans the mess hall, would beat us in front of the guards.  They would not stop him.  And some of the police were bad, including the one who broke the arm of the black man from Rwanda.  Many came down and saw what the guard did.  We were down in the basketball court area.  The guy with the broken arm did nothing wrong.  A guard hit him with a stick because he didn't respond to the count order.  When the police broke the guy's arm, the lawyer could not find the guy at the hospital.  The police hid him from the lawyer.  The police sent him to Athens on Tuesday.[184]

Although Human Rights Watch was not able to locate the "Rwandan" (a number of people expressed doubt about his nationality), the same incident was described to us by people inside the detention center, outside the center in Samos, and by migrants in Athens.  A Palestinian man in Athens told Human Rights Watch:

I was in there [in Samos] when they broke the Rwandan's arm.  They tell you to stand in rows of 10 on the basketball court.  They counted us one time, then we left, then a second time, and we left, and then a third time about five minutes after the second count.  On the third time, the Rwandan didn't come.  Maybe he didn't understand.  There was a new policeman who is not good, who had only been there for two days.  He hit the Rwandan with a club and broke his arm.  They took him to the hospital, and then brought him back. They released him on May 27, the same day as me.[185]

Lesvos/Mitilini  

Migrants and asylum seekers universally refer to Lesvos by the name of its main town where the detention center is located, Mitilini.  Human Rights Watch was not granted permission to visit the center there, but many former detainees described it as being a big building like a warehouse converted into a jail with iron cells, each holding about 20 people with one dirty hole-in-the-floor toilet without water for sanitary purposes; detainees consistently describe the Mitilini jail as filthy and infested with fleas and other insects.[186]  A 28-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad gave this account of his 22 days in Mitilini:

It was very dirty. The hair is not growing on this spot on my chin because I had a skin infection because that place in Mitilini was so dirty. The guards treated us like animals…  It was the time of Ramadan and they were serving pork.  When we complained about the pork, they told us they didn't care.  "If you don't like the pork, why do you come here?" they said….

They never gave us any interviews, only slaps and kicks.  Nobody there spoke Arabic.  When they released us from jail, they gave us a paper telling us we had to leave the country in one month.  It was written in the Greek language.  I asked a guard what the paper meant.  He slapped me and told me to sign.[187]

A 25-year-old Afghan told Human Rights Watch about his treatment by the guards at Mitilini:

The only times the guards spoke to us was to shout at us to shut up and to call us "Malaka."[188] We had no other contact with them.  They stayed outside the door.  They didn't ask us a question.  When we were first taken to the hospital for chest x-rays, they wouldn't touch us; it was like we weren't human.  We had one guy who was sick from having been in wet clothes from the sea.  They didn't let him see a doctor.  When they fingerprinted us, one 16-year-old kid made a mistake, so they started slapping him.

               

An 18-year-old Afghan who was 17-years-old at the time he was in Mitilini as an unaccompanied child, said:

I was detained at Mitilini for two days.  Conditions were very bad.  There was no food.  Once a day we got something to eat.  Because the bed was so dirty nobody wanted to sleep on the bed.  I slept on the floor.  I had a thin blanket.  We could not sleep because there were crumbs on the floor and small black animals from the woods and a lot of fleas.  In one cell there were 25 persons.  The room was about 40 meters.  There were younger boys.  The police brought us food.  They put one dish in front of the door and said everybody should take one.  S0me took two, some only one.[189] 

Although Human Rights Watch did not have direct access to the detention facility at Mitilini and cannot comment from first-hand observation on conditions there, the CPT's 2008 report said that a "drastic cut in occupancy rates" (there were only five detainees in the facility at the time of the CPT visit) had contributed to "improved material conditions."[190]  Mitilini was the only facility for migrant detention where the CPT noted an improvement between its 2005 and 2007 assessments.[191]

Mersinidi Detention Facility at Chios

The police on Chios hold migrants in two rooms in a wood house near the beach before transferring them to the Mersinidi detention facility.  Migrants say that conditions in the wooden house are filthy.   A 34-year-old Iraqi man gave this description:

We went directly to the police after landing.  The police took us to the police station where we had to stand in a very small room the size of a closet all night.  There was no place to sit.  In the morning, they took us to a wooden house near the police station that was in sight of the beach.  There were two rooms without doors and the toilet in the middle.  It was very dirty with shit and pee covering the WC, on the floor, and in the corners of the room.  I slept in shit. A lawyer named Natasha came to the place on her motorcycle.[192]  She had to hold her nose while talking to us because it smelled so bad.  It was cold at night and two people had to share one blanket.  The blankets were covered with lice.  The word "dirty" is too good to describe these blankets.  It made me sick. I got scabies disease.   You wouldn't put a dog in such a place.  It nearly killed me to stay there.  I would not apply for asylum here.[193]

Conditions at the Mersinidi detention facility in Chios, described as a series of prefabricated structures made of a fiberglass-type material and metal floors and surrounded by a fence, are better than in the wooden building.  The jail is described as dirty, but the migrants clean it themselves. The migrants are held longer at Mersinidi than at the jail. They are permitted to exercise in the yard in the mornings, and migrants said that the guards there treated them decently.

The Athens Area (Attica Prefecture) [194]

Athens Airport

There are at least two detention facilities that migrants refer to as airport detention:  one is a small holding area in the international departures section of the Eleftherios Venizelos airport that is comprised of a few cells where detainees are usually held for not more than a few days; the other is a jail near the old airport of Elliniko at the south of Athens near a former U.S. military base where migrants are held longer.  Migrants are sometimes transported from one airport detention facility to the other (and in some cases to a third facility, the local police station at Elliniko where undocumented migrants are also detained), so there is sometimes a bit of confusion about which one is being described. 

Nevertheless, quite a number of interviewees told Human Rights Watch about their experiences of detention in one or another of these facilities.[195]  Some who wind up in the airport jails are people who are caught trying to leave with improper travel documents, who are held pending a court appearance to be prosecuted for using false documents or illegal entry or exit.  Others are people returned from other European countries under the Dublin II regulation.  The 28-year-old Sabean from Baghdad who was quoted above about his deportation to Turkey stayed for one month at the Athens airport jail.[196]   He described the airport jail as "a very dirty place.  It was crowded with many people of all nationalities, but the worst thing was the dirt and the insects.  The toilets were very dirty with no doors."[197]

A 24-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad who was arrested with a fake passport when he tried to leave Greece in October 2007 described drunken guards and filthy conditions at the small airport detention center:

After getting caught, they put me in a small detention place at the airport.  I was held there for 24 hours with no food and no water.  There was urine on the floor.  There weren't any windows.  They kept bringing more and more people they caught trying to leave until there were 60 or 70 in the small room.  There was a second room for families.  I could hear the children crying.

The guards couldn't speak English, so they used me to translate for the women.  They asked for bread for their hungry children. Eventually they brought some biscuits.  By midnight, 1:00 am, the guards were all really drunk.  You could see and smell that they were drunk.  They would hit random people.  They took our fingerprints again and then moved us to the second detention center at the airport.  They held us there for a week at the end of October 2007.[198] 

 Petrou Ralli 

Other migrants provided Human Rights Watch with testimonies about the Petrou Ralli detention facility that were consistent with what Human Rights Watch observed and with the testimonies cited.[199]  Petrou Ralli is where migrants are held when they are about to be expelled.[200]  Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour the facility, and although we did not have completely private access to the detainees, we were generally able to speak briefly to a large number of detainees in their cells and to observe conditions there.  Women are held on a separate floor in the same configuration of cells as the men.

There is no mistaking Petrou Ralli for anything other than a jail.  The detainees are kept in a line of cells along a corridor. Each cell has five cement beds.  The three concrete walls of most cells are covered in graffiti; the fourth wall with a barred, locked door is of iron bars and faces the corridor, affording the detainees no privacy.  The detainees need to ask for permission every time they want to use the bathroom.  The guards allow them out of their cells for two hours a day, but allow them into the rooftop exercise yard for only one hour a week.  The detainees spend little time outside their cells and have little to do inside the cells other than to sit or lie on their beds all day.

An Iraqi Kurd who had been in Petrou Ralli for 84 days at the time of the Human Rights Watch visit and was counting his last 6 days before his mandatory release said, "In three months here I have been outside for a total of 12 hours."[201]

Human Rights Watch asked one of the guards standing in the corridor what he saw as the biggest problem at Petrou Ralli.  He said, "Too many prisoners, too many of different cultures.  We get racists who don't behave.  This is not a hotel.  We don't open too many doors at once to keep control.  If we are not careful, they get into fights."[202]  He said that the authorities try to match detainees of the same nationality in each cell.  He added that when criminal aliens complete their prison sentences they are brought to Petrou Ralli to be held in administrative detention pending their deportation.  The mix of criminals with noncriminals adds to the anxiety and fear of migrants with no criminal history.

Even though Petrou Ralli appears to have been cleaned prior to the Human Rights Watch visit, a number of detainees complained about the unhygienic conditions.  A 16-year-old boy said, "I spent two months in Petrou Ralli, until April 13 [2008]. I didn't have enough soap and no toothbrush.  I didn't brush my teeth in two months.  I didn't have a bed sheet, just a blanket.  I had skin parasites."[203]  A Pakistani man with a rash, talked to Human Rights Watch through the bars of his cell:

We are all sick here.  We don't have soap.  I have been detained for 17 days.  I don't have a toothbrush.  I can't wash my clothes.  I have been in the same clothes, underwear, shoes.  Sometimes they give toilet paper.  We don't get any sheets.  We can't complain to the police.[204]

This man said that he was compelled to urinate into a bottle because the guards were unresponsive to his requests to leave his cell to go to the bathroom.  Human Rights Watch observed a bottle filled with urine next to his bed.[205]

Women at Petrou Ralli complained of having to buy their own soap and of the difficulty of keeping clean.  A Somali woman with a bad rash on her face said:

I asked for a doctor for the problem with my skin.  They gave me a cream and the rash got worse.  I don't get soap to keep clean.  On Wednesdays, we go out for one or two hours.  We don't have phone cards so can't make phone calls.  The only way we can communicate with the guards is through sign language.[206]