Summary
Human rights don’t exist for the police.
—Dome Kafari, 28 year old undocumented migrant from Benin, Athens, February 13, 2013.
No matter how many years you live here, you will remain a foreigner.
—Lamine Kaba, 41 year old long-term legal migrant from Guinea, Athens, April 14, 2013.
In early August 2012, the Greek government launched a police operation aimed at cracking down on irregular immigration and crime in Athens. It is cruelly ironic that the authorities decided to call the initiative Operation Xenios Zeus. The name refers to the ancient Greek god Zeus’ patronage of hospitality and guests. In Greek mythology, Zeus, the king of the gods, was called upon to avenge wrongs done to strangers. In fact, Operation Xenios Zeus is anything but hospitable towards foreign migrants and asylum seekers in the Greek capital.
A key tactic of Operation Xenios Zeus is the use of police powers to conduct identity checks to verify the legal status of individuals presumed to be irregular migrants. While such police stops were frequent before the launch of the operation, official statistics indicate a significant intensification of stops since its onset. Between August 4, 2012 and February 22, 2013—the most recent period for which government statistics are available—police had stopped almost 85,000 people of foreign origin on the streets of Athens and taken to a police station for examination of their identification papers and legal status. Only 4,811—about 6 percent—were found to be residing unlawfully in Greece.
In a country already notorious for its dysfunctional asylum system, inhuman and degrading migration detention conditions, and law enforcement abuse, an intensification of police sweeps aimed at cracking down on irregular migrants in downtown Athens raised immediate concerns. On August 8, 2012—when 6,000 people had already been rounded up—Human Rights Watch issued a press release urging authorities to avoid discrimination based on race or ethnicity, arbitrary detention, and inhuman and degrading treatment.
This report is based on interviews with forty-four people who have been subjected to at least one stop since the launch of Operation Xenios Zeus. Thirty-five of them had a legal right to be in Greece at the time of the stops because they are asylum seekers, legal foreign residents, or Greeks of foreign origin.
The accounts we heard confirmed our early concerns about Operation Xenios Zeus. Out on the streets police regularly, even repeatedly, stop and search individuals who appear to be foreigners and order them to provide proof of a legal right to be in Greece. Even when these individuals have documents, all too often police stop them and then transfer them to a police station where they may detain them for hours pending verification of their legal status.
The lengthy and intrusive procedure amounts to arbitrary and discriminatory deprivation of liberty. Many legal residents and registered asylum seekers interviewed for this report had experienced being stopped by police officers in the street, confined in police buses, and detained in police stations and the Aliens Police Division for up to five hours. One person interviewed was held for approximately 10 hours, on one occasion. The Greek authorities argue that the procedure is necessary to identify forged documents and to verify photocopies of documents, and that they do not have sufficient capacity or adequate equipment to verify the validity of identity documents on the street. However, authorities have failed to take steps to ensure that police are able to do this verification on the street, including by putting in place the technical means allowing police to do so remotely.
Ali, a 33-year-old Afghan registered asylum seeker told us how on April 2, 2013 his plans for a family picnic were thwarted when police officers stopped him near Attica metro station along with his 12-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son:
The police caught me… The kids explained that ‘he is our father, he has a pink card [asylum seeker’s card], why did you catch him?’ They [the police] said that ‘we will take him to Allodapon [police station], we will do the control [of the identity documents] and we will release him.’ Then the police told me to send the kids home … I said, ‘But we live in Piraeus [outside Athens], how are the kids going to go on their own?’ They told me, ‘We don’t care, tell them to go.’
Ali chose to keep his distraught children with him throughout the procedure, though they were kept separately from him and about forty-five other people the police had rounded up. After five hours he and his children were released only after a Greek nongovernmental organization (NGO) intervened on his behalf.
Police authorities say that police officers determine whom to stop using their informed judgment and intelligence about where undocumented migrants congregate. However, the fact that only 6 percent of stops have led to the identification and detention of undocumented migrants undermines this assertion and gives rise to the concern that the police may be using ethnic profiling in determining whom to stop. Intelligence-led stops should lead to a higher detection rate. As police statistics do not include the many people stopped for a quick identity check in the street and released on the spot, the overall detection rate is likely to be even lower than 6 percent. Moreover, many interviewees felt they were stopped by the police because of their physical characteristics, and we heard accounts of clear targeting on the basis of race or ethnicity.
Tupac, a 19-year-old Guinean registered asylum seeker, for example, told us that in early February at around 5 p.m., uniformed and plain clothed police officers forced black and Asian people, including him, out of a bus at Amerikis Square in central Athens:
There were at least seven blacks, and two Asians.... [P]olice officers came to the door and said in Greek: ‘Oli i black ekso, oli i black ekso [All blacks out, all blacks out].’ … The Greeks in the bus were clapping to encourage them.
Faustin Moto Pamba, a 28-year-old legal migrant from Congo, told Human Rights Watch in April 2013 in Athens:
Xenios Zeus refers to one of Zeus’s many nicknames [patron of hospitality]. In ancient times, Greeks were hospitable. When a stranger was coming they were obliged to … make him feel he’s at home. Now they stop us so that we feel at home, or in order to feel we are different and that we should go?
Faustin Moto Pamba, a 28-year-old legal migrant from Congo, who has been in Greece since he was a baby, was taken into police custody for verification of his papers during a sweep operation in February, in central Athens, Greece. © 2013 Human Rights Watch
In November 2012, the US Embassy in Greece took the unusual step of updating its country-specific information on Greece to warn US visitors about “confirmed reports of US African-American citizens detained by police authorities conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants in Athens.”
News emerged in January 2013 that a Nigerian-born US citizen had been detained and handcuffed by the police in July 2012 in the context of an immigration stop. He alleged that officers beat him unconscious when he tried to take a photograph of his handcuffs with his mobile phone.
Police mistreatment of migrants and asylum seekers is a longstanding, serious problem in Greece, as documented by Human Rights Watch and others. While in the course of this research we only heard four accounts of physical abuse during immigration stops, almost everyone we interviewed complained of disrespectful treatment such as rude, insulting, and threatening behavior. Body pat-downs and bag searches during immigration stops appear to be routine, even in the absence of any reasonable suspicion that the individual is carrying unlawful or dangerous objects.
Greece has a right to control irregular immigration and a duty to improve security on the streets for everyone. However, the breadth and intensity of immigration sweeps in the context of Operation Xenios Zeus raise serious concerns about whether the means to achieve those legitimate aims are necessary and proportionate. Official statistics and our research demonstrate that the police are casting an extraordinarily wide net, and subjecting individuals with a legal right to be in Greece, including tourists, to treatment prohibited by international law.
The right to liberty and security of the person is a bedrock principle of international human rights law. To be lawful, any deprivation of liberty must be carried out in accordance with the law, be nondiscriminatory, and be free from arbitrariness. While the Greek government asserts that detention in the context of an identity check is a justifiable restriction on the freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch believes the widespread detention of foreigners for hours for the purpose of verifying their legal status amounts to arbitrary deprivation of liberty. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention warned in January 2013, following its visit to Greece, that “any detention on discriminatory grounds constitutes arbitrary detention and furthermore, that detention without any legal basis also renders the detention arbitrary.”
Ethnic profiling is discriminatory and unlawful when police systematically target certain groups for stops in the absence of objective criteria, even when these actions are grounded in unconscious stereotyping rather than an intentional policy. The European Court of Human Rights has clarified that differential treatment based exclusively or to a decisive extent on ethnicity cannot be justified in a contemporary democratic society. Ethnic profiling is unlawful in the context of immigration control as well as general policing, as the UN Human Rights Committee asserted in a landmark 2009 decision when it found that the stopping of a black Spanish citizen in a train station in Spain amounted to prohibited discrimination.
In April 2013, the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner, Nils Muižnieks, issued a highly critical report based on a January 2013 visit to Greece. The report urged the authorities to “put an end to the practice of ethnic profiling by the police, reportedly widely used … as part of the ‘Xenios Zeus’ police operation....”
The abuses documented in this report also violate Greek laws and policies on nondiscrimination, justifiable body and bag searches, and grounds for deprivation of liberty.
The lack of training for officers participating in Operation Xenios Zeus makes the use of ethnic profiling and default deprivation of liberty more likely. The operation as a general rule does not involve specialized teams but rather mobilizes police officers in different parts of the city, particularly in the downtown area. With the exception of officers attached to the Border Guards unit, police conducting immigration stops receive no specialized training in immigration and asylum issues, including on how to establish if a person has a legal basis to stay in Greece and how to detect forged documents. Nor have those directing Operation Xenios Zeus issued specific guidelines to officers involved in the operation on how to conduct stops.
Police officials consider Operation Xenios Zeus a success, citing as key indicators lower rates of crime, increased pedestrian traffic in central Athens, and more accurate records of immigrants living in Athens. A comparison between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 shows that robberies decreased by 14.38% and thefts-burglaries by 24.39% in Attica. It is unclear, however, whether positive results are due to indiscriminate identity checks or instead to more effective policing of actual criminal behavior. In the context of Operation Xenios Zeus, police only arrested 59 people (both foreigners and nationals) for criminal offenses such as possession of illegal weapons and drugs between August 4, 2012, and February 6, 2013. What is clear is that these identity checks imply a significant investment of police resources and have led to widespread violation of rights.
Human Rights Watch calls on the Greek government to revise their general stop and search powers, including Operation Xenios Zeus, to ensure that all measures to identify irregular migrants are conducted in full compliance with national and international law prohibiting discrimination, including ethnic profiling, and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
