Frontex has been present in the Evros region since October 2010. The RABIT mission was designed as an emergency measure in response to the arrival of a large number of migrants to Greece. RABIT was initially planned to end December 2 but was extended until March 2, 2011, and then replaced by a permanent Frontex presence conducting the same tasks. During Frontex’s deployment, on January 21, 2011, the European CtHR issued a judgment that was not specifically directed at Frontex but which is fundamentally relevant to its role in Greece. In M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece the court found that Greek detention practices violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, and that Greece’s asylum system was dysfunctional. The court also concluded that Belgium too violated its human rights obligations by knowingly exposing the applicant, an Afghan asylum seeker, to inhuman and degrading treatment when it transferred him back to Greece. The court said that Belgium infringed upon a right that it had previously recognized as “non-derogable, even in cases of extreme pressure or emergency.” In the course of the RABIT mission in Greece, Frontex also facilitated the transfer of migrants to centers of detention within Greece where Human Rights Watch documented the same inhuman and degrading conditions as those condemned by the ECtHR. Human Rights Watch contends that Frontex is similarly responsible for having knowingly exposed migrants to treatment which is absolutely prohibited under human rights law. During the four months examined in this report, RABIT patrols regularly apprehended migrants who crossed the border into Greece and took them, sometimes in buses provided by Frontex, to the detention centers. After patrols, border guards deployed as part of the RABIT force reported back to their home authorities, who knew or should have known about the conditions to which their agents were sending the migrants. Nevertheless, no European participating state publicly raised concerns that the activities of the patrols involved violations of the prohibition on inhuman treatment, and none withdrew from the mission. In December 2010, during the RABIT deployment, Human Rights Watch visited detention centers in the Evros region of Greece and found that the Greek authorities were holding migrants, including members of vulnerable groups such as unaccompanied children, for weeks or months in conditions that amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. We found overcrowding to be a common problem in detention facilities in the Evros region. In Tychero, Feres, and Soufli, women were held in the same cells with men. The Feres police station held 97 detainees at the time of our visit, though the police said its capacity THE EU’S DIRTY HANDS 2