Undocumented migrants and asylum seekers face “shocking” detention conditions in crisis-hit Greece, a UN envoy said yesterday, raising concerns about children being held at a police station and severe overcrowding.
Francois Crepeau, the UN special rapporteur on migrant human rights, said EU states should do more to help genuine refugees leave Greece, where he said they are “trapped”.
In recession for the past five years and enforcing a tough austerity policy in return for EU-IMF loans, Greece is currently home to hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants and refugees from Asia and Africa.
With state services nearing collapse after spending cuts and layoffs, authorities last year decided to round up thousands of migrants lacking residency papers in urban police sweeps and detain them until they can be repatriated.
Owing to a shortage of prison space, several disused army barracks have been turned into “temporary hospitality” centres for them.
Crepeau said he had visited 11 detention centres and related police facilities around the country during a nine-day visit, part of a year-long study on the management of the European Union’s external borders.
He said he saw infants behind bars at an Athens police station, a group of Afghan children living under an underpass at the port of Patras, and a cramped detention centre near the Greek-Turkish border where newly arrived migrants can be held indefinitely.
“Twenty-eight people are held in a small room. The beds are concrete slabs. The toilets are filthy. There is no artificial light. These are shocking places,” said Crepeau, who has also visited Tunisia, Turkey and Italy. Citing a “need for solidarity”, he said “EU members should do more at a bilateral level” to help Greece’s refugees.
“At present there is no will to re-establish refugees trapped in Greece,” he said. “EU states have a much bigger role to play in supporting Greece, but also Turkey and Tunisia.”
Greece lacks a coherent strategy for handling undocumented migrants who cannot be deported, Crepeau said. Government officials told him that a civilian asylum service and a proper first reception procedure to screen vulnerable migrants would be in place by June.