By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

BRUSSELS, The Netherlands — On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch issued a twelve-page report, entitled The EU’s Dirty Hands, which provides extensive evidence demonstrating a European agency’s role in exposing migrants to severe human rights violations.

Frontex was established on October 26, 2004 as an executive agency of the European Union (“EU”).  Its purpose has been to generate “cooperation between EU member states on issues of border enforcement.”  Since its establishment, Frontex has played “a key role in enforcing EU immigration policy.” While participating states, like Greece, provide the “manpower and material support,” Frontex employees help to “manage the influx of migrants [including those seeking asylum] into the north-eastern region of Greece along the Evros River bordering Turkey, among other places.”

Commencing in July 2007, Frontex operations were supplemented with the Rapid Border Intervention Team (“RABIT”), designed “as an emergency measure in response to the arrival of a large number of migrants to Greece.” As part of the RABIT mission, Frontex personnel were “authorized to apprehend migrants and then transfer them to Greek counterparts who ran detention centers in Greece.”

The European Court for Human Rights noted in M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece that Greek detention practices violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights which strictly prohibits torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, and called the current asylum system “dysfunctional.” The Court went on to hold that Belgium violated the human rights of an Afghan asylum seeker when the State transported him back to Greece. Arguably, Frontex could be liable for such participation under this decision. Human Rights Watch seeks to extend this holding to Frontex, which is bound by the European Convention, by arguing that the Agency is “also responsible for having knowingly exposed migrants to treatment which is absolutely prohibited under human rights law.”

During Frontex’s RABIT mission, Human Rights Watch conducted an investigation of various detention centers in the Evros region of Greece in December 2010.  While there, they found that Greek authorities held “migrants, including members of vulnerable groups, such as unaccompanied children, for weeks or months in conditions that amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment.”

At one detention center, men, women and children are all herded together in a cell where “sewage was running on the floors. According to the Greek guards, this was because the prisoners broke the toilets, while protesting their conditions. The smell was hard to bear, and Greek guards wore surgical masks when they entered the passageway between the large barred cells,” reported Human Rights Watch.

Another detention center held 130 detainees while police authorities reported that the space was meant to hold 48. Furthermore, migrants were forced to “sleep on pieces of cardboard or directly on the concrete floors.” The detainees were given bottles in which to urinate because they did not have access to toilets. They were escorted by prison guards to a field to defecate.

At yet another detention center, 120 migrants were being held in a space meant for 30 people. One boy recounted that for seven days he had been sleeping in the toilet because there was no other space.

A 17-year-old Iraqi boy explained that he tried to escape, but he was caught. “They beat me a lot on my neck, legs, head. They kicked me…for fours hours they tied my hands to the bars…and they threw water on me…I was beaten for 30 minutes or one hour. Everybody beat me. I was not taken to the doctor. I was injured on my fingers, and my nail fell off. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep because I was in so much pain.”

In a separate report issued by Doctors Without Borders, it was revealed that more than “60 percent of the migrant’s medical conditions are directly caused by or linked to the degrading conditions.” 1,147 out of 1,809 patients treated between December 10 and March 2011 were diagnosed with respiratory tract infections, body pains, diarrhea, gastrointestinal disorders, psychological conditions, and skin diseases, all health problems directly related to poor living conditions.

While many of the detainees come to Greece seeking asylum from the turmoil in their own countries, Greece is currently in the midst of its own turbulent financial crisis. At least some of the degrading human rights violations are likely to be an effect of Greece’s fiscal woes.  A commander at one of the detention centers explained that, “they simply do not have the ability to provide better standards: we owe money to laundry and food providers. The detainees don’t have soap now because the supermarket that provided this is fed up. We asked again and again. Some people buy from their own money.  When we get help it is usually not from our state but from others.”

The report has been met with some resistance. For example, EU spokeswoman, Michele Cercone commented in Brussels that, “the logic of placing part of the blame on Frontex was entirely flawed. We’re aware that conditions in some of these centers are unacceptable. But Greek authorities alone bore the responsibility for that.”

Futhermore, Frontex spokesman said that, “the agency welcomed much of the new report, but…transporting migrants to centers where they were interviewed and identified did not constitute complicity in abuse.”

Greek officials have made no immediate comment.

For more information, please visit:

Forbes Magazine – Rights Group: EU Agency Exposing Migrants to Abuse – 21 Sept. 2011

Human Rights Watch – The EU’s Dirty Hands – 21 September 2011

The Washington Post – Rights Group Says EU Border Enforcement Agency Exposing Migrants to Abuse in Greek Detention – 21 September 2011

Doctors Without Borders – Greece: Migrants’ Medical Problems Due to Inhumane Detention Conditions – 15 June 2011