The EU’s border control agency Frontex yesterday faced damning claims by Human Rights Watch for its alleged collaboration with the Greek authorities in exposing asylum seekers to inhuman and degrading conditions.
The organisation’s report, titled The EU’s Dirty Hands, is based on interviews with asylum seekers conducted on the Greek-Turkish border. It accuses Frontex officials, deployed on this border since the end of last year, of apprehending and taking asylum seekers to police stations and detention centres in the south of Greece which were not fit to host them.
Although admitting that some of the detention centres were not up to standard, Frontex rebutted the allegations by shifting the responsibility for these centres upon Greece.
Since November 2010, following an influx of illegal immigrants crossing over to the EU from Turkey, Frontex has deployed some 175 officials from all over the EU, including Malta, to control the situation on the Greek border.
Consequently, illegal crossings between the two countries were slashed to a minimum. However, according to the Human Rights Watch report, this has come at the price of the migrants’ dignity.
“Through its actions, Frontex has become a partner in exposing migrants to treatment that it knows is absolutely prohibited under human rights laws,” Bill Frelick, Refugee Program director at Human Rights Watch, told a press conference in Brussels yesterday.
In December 2010, when Frontex had already deployed its officials, Human Rights Watch visited detention centres in the Evros region and found that the Greek authorities were holding migrants, including unaccompanied children, for weeks or months in conditions that amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment.
For example, the Feres police station held 97 detainees even though the police said its capacity was 30.
A 50-year-old Georgian woman detained there said: “You cannot imagine how dirty and difficult it is for me here… It’s not appropriate to be with these men. I don’t sleep at night. I just sit on a mattress.”
The report states: “In the Fylakio migrant detention centre, Human Rights Watch found unaccompanied children mixed with unrelated adults in overcrowded cells. Sewage was running on the floors and the smell was hard to bear. Greek guards wore surgical masks when they entered the passageway between the large barred cells.
Yesterday, Mr Frelick insisted that while the primary focus of the report was how Frontex had a responsibility not to be complicit in human rights violations, that did not absolve the Greek authorities.
“The Greek government should take immediate steps to improve detention conditions and carry out the asylum system reforms it promised.”
Both the European Commission and the EU agency rushed to disassociate themselves from the conclusions of the report, putting the blame squarely on the Greek authorities.
Michele Cercone, Commission spokesman for Home Affairs, said the logic of placing part of the blame on Frontex was entirely flawed.
“We’re well aware that conditions in some of these centres are unacceptable,” he said “but Greek authorities alone bore responsibility for that.”
Frontex took the same defensive line with its spokesman Michal Parzyszek stating that “Frontex cannot pay for the failings of a member state.”
In its recommendations, the rights group said that Frontex should immediately make its engagement in border enforcement operations in Greece contingent on placing apprehended migrants in facilities with decent conditions.
It also recommended the future involvement of the Malta-based European Asylum Support Office (EASO) in developing training programmes in asylum processing specifically designed for the Greek personnel posted in the region and to assess the impact of inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees on access to asylum in Greece