RIGHTS: ‘Refugees Tortured in Greece’

By Apostolis Fotiadis Reprint | | Print |

Apostolis Fotiadis

ATHENS, Oct 29 2007 (IPS) - Serious indication of torture, widespread violation of human rights, systematic abuse and complete neglect of human life is what refugees and undocumented immigrants face on the south-eastern border of the European Community.

This dire reality was denounced in the report ‘The truth may be bitter but it must be told’ which was released Monday Oct. 29 by the Greek Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Refugees and Migrants and the German human rights organisation PRO ASYL. The title of the report was taken from a phrase first seen printed on the wall of a former detention camp on the Greek island Lesvos.

The survey is based on interviews with refugees from a wide variety of countries of origin in and outside the detention centres of the Greek islands Chios, Lesvos and Samos, with people who crossed the north-eastern Greek-Turkish border of river Evros, and discussions with authorities and local activists.

The report says Greek coast guards push incoming migrants back to Turkish waters, abandon them on uninhabited islands, or damage their vessels to force them to return back to Turkey.

Since the beginning of 2007 traffickers seem to have increasingly directed flows of undocumented people to Turkey and then into Greece. The long sea front between the two countries makes policing extremely difficult. As a result the three islands, which stand a few miles away from the Turkish coast, have been swarmed by new arrivals.

The coast guard is fighting this flow by any means it can find. In Evros refugees arrested upon arrival are held incommunicado for several days and then forced back to Turkey, the report says.

The practices of the coast guard and border police constitute a serious violation of the principle of non-refoulement included in various conventions that Greece endorses, including the 1951 Geneva Convention and the European Convention of Human Rights.

The situation does not improve after someone manages to cross the border. “The entire administrative procedure for refugees and migrants violates fundamental rights, in particular the rights to a fair hearing, to access to a fair procedure and to an effective appeal,” the report says.

People are detained for long periods without hope of protection. According to the United Nations Council for Refugees in Greece, during the first half of 2007 only 16 out of 14,594 applications for refugee status were approved.

During detention people are often mocked and harassed. Maria Piniou Kalli, director of the Medical Rehabilitation Centre for Victims of Torture told IPS that in at least two cases on Chios the degree of mistreatment amounted to torture.

“After three months of detention it is difficult to find physical evidence. But from the victims’ reports it appears that coast guards who interrogated them used methods of brutal torture,” Kalli said.

“They beat them up severely, pushed their heads into buckets full of water, or covered them with plastic bags, thus creating the impression of suffocation, mock-executed them, and hit them with a hard object on their soles.

“What worries me is that more of the methods employed do not cause permanent damage. This might mean that people are instructed on how to do it.”

The coast guard had been given special training by the U.S. mercenary company Blackwater in preparation for the Olympic Games 2004.

The activists behind the report want corrective action. “What we experience today is the result of European migration politics. This is the Fortress Europe,” Giota Masouridou, a representative of the lawyers group told IPS.

“We want a new refugee asylum system for Europe. We demand abolition of the Dublin II regulations (under which refugees can apply for asylum only in the country of entry) so that people can apply for asylum to the country they want to stay in.

“The inhuman technocratic rules of Dublin II discriminate in relation to member states at the outer borders of the EU, letting countries like Greece deal with the problem alone. Europe needs another mechanism for taking responsibility for refugees.”

The report also demands that Greece immediately stops illegitimate refoulement, and does everything possible to respect human rights. “Things will improve only if and when responsibility for migration is transferred from uniformed services to real specialists,” Masouridou said.