Three human rights monitoring groups have submitted a joint letter to the European Council Committee for the Prevention of Torture with a report that concludes Greece is subjecting third country nationals in detention to conditions “which could amount to torture or inhuman and degrading treatment.”
The report published this week by Mobile Info Team, Border Criminologies, and the Border Violence Monitoring Network interviewed third country nationals who were being held in Pre-Removal Detention Centers all across Greece. They found that detention is used far more frequently than the European Council recommends; that said detention contains people in a prison-like environment with unsanitary conditions; lacks healthcare; includes a pattern of physical ill-treatment, verbal and racist abuse from police officers; and does not have a functional complaint mechanism for mistreatment.
At the moment Greece employs a 99.2% detention rate in deportation procedures. Additionally the 2002 Greek Asylum Code has extensive provisions on the detention of asylum seekers. At the end of 2023, 48.59% of people detained in Pre-Removal Detention Centers across Greece were asylum seekers, meaning their claims were still being investigated.
Most people who are detained in Greek Pre-Removal Detention Centers are held for months at a time. On 31 December 2023, one third of the people in these seven detention centers had been held for over six months.
Almost all of the detainees interviewed in the study described regular physical abuse. “Six police officers took me outside my room and slapped and beat me. They put handcuffs on me very tightly for over one and a half hours. I was screaming from the pain, but they didn’t care. They didn’t want to open them [the handcuffs]” said one detainee.
Another described that he saw others he was held with taken to “secret rooms” by officers and later being returned to cells with visible injuries.
A delegation from the European Council Committee for the Prevention of Torture visited Greece last year to investigate migrant detention and accommodation in Greece and came to similar conclusions.
The European Council committee toured the Pre-Removal Detention Centres In Corinth, Fylakio, Kos, Paranesti, Petrou Ralli and Xanthi. In a report published this summer they pointed to several concerning practices including the “deliberate physical ill-treatment of detained foreign nationals by police officers”, chronic lack of translation and legal aid, lack of healthcare, and unsanitary material conditions.
The committee recommended that detention should be used as a measure of last resort as prescribed in EU law, and called on the Greek authorities to “reform their immigration detention system with a view to ensuring that foreign nationals deprived of their liberty are held in suitable premises, offering material conditions and a regime appropriate to their legal situation and staffed with suitably qualified personnel.”
This most recent report from the human rights monitoring groups, produced after the European Council report, shows that no apparent changes have been made towards their recommendations.
The conditions in Greek detention centers have been condemned widely and frequently. Just in October, A United Nations Human Rights Committee raised questions again about the poor conditions in these detention centers.
According to documents from the Ministry of Citizen Protection, immigrant detention in Greece will in fact be expanded– €30.6 million of the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund money has been earmarked to build out detention centers.
