considered the possible implications of a land deployment in Greece and of its involvement in a broken system.49 The Frontex officer, Leszek Szymanski, head of the Operational Management Component in the Frontex’s Piraeus office, visited the detention center of Fylakio, as well as other detention centers in October 2010, and found that the facilities were overcrowded (he told Human Rights Watch that around 700 people were detained in Fylakio at the time of his visit, almost twice that facility’s capacity of 386).50 Szymanski also visited other detention facilities, including the Tychero detention facility which, as we saw in our later visit to Tychero, houses detainees in large, dimly lit rooms with cement beds. Frontex’s decision to visit the detention facilities suggests that the agency understood that their conditions were relevant to its task. The agency told Human Rights Watch that it knew about the “difficult” conditions since the beginning of the agency’s presence in the area in October 2010.51 The conditions that existed in Fylakio at the time of Szymanski’s fact-finding mission were indeed nothing new. Various human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly criticized conditions in Greek detention centers as failing to meet international standards throughout the past decade.52 In January 2011 the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) reviewed the vast reporting literature that had accumulated on Greece since 2005, summarizing its findings as follows: All the centers visited by bodies and organizations that produced the reports listed above describe a similar situation to varying degrees of gravity: overcrowding, dirt, lack of ventilation, little or no possibility of taking a walk, no place to relax, insufficient mattresses, no free access to toilets, inadequate sanitary facilities, no privacy, limited access to care. Many of the 49 Human Rights Watch interview with Kari Wahlström, head of Frontex Operational Office, with Leszek Szymanski and Gerald Baumkirchner, Piraeus, February 15, 2011. (Below:” Human Rights Watch interview with Wahlström and staff, Piraeus, February 15, 2011,” unless only a particular named person is being quoted.) 50 In a letter of May 19, 2011 from Gil Arias Fernández, Deputy Executive Director of Frontex to Human Rights Watch, Frontex challenges that Szymanski, who was one of a group of experts sent to the Evros region, ever “examined or inspected” Greek detention centers. They do not however dispute that he visited the centers and witnessed the conditions. 51 Frontex letter to Human Right Watch, unpublished document, March 29, 2011. 52 See http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k2/europe10.html. See also Human Rights Watch, Stuck in a Revolving Door, 2008, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/11/26/stuck-revolving-door; Human Rights Watch, Greece–Left to Survive: Systematic Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Migrant Children in Greece, 2008, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/12/11/left-survive. 21 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | SEPTEMBER 2011