After getting caught, they put me in a small detention place at the airport. I was held there for 24 hours with no food and no water. There was urine on the floor. There weren’t any windows. They kept bringing more and more people they caught trying to leave until there were 60 or 70 in the small room. There was a second room for families. I could hear the children crying. The guards couldn’t speak English, so they used me to translate for the women. They asked for bread for their hungry children. Eventually they brought some biscuits. By midnight, 1:00 am, the guards were all really drunk. You could see and smell that they were drunk. They would hit random people. They took our fingerprints again and then moved us to the second detention center at the airport. They held us there for a week at the end of October 2007.198 Petrou Ralli Other migrants provided Human Rights Watch with testimonies about the Petrou Ralli detention facility that were consistent with what Human Rights Watch observed and with the testimonies cited.199 Petrou Ralli is where migrants are held when they are about to be expelled.200 Human Rights Watch was allowed to tour the facility, and although we did not have completely private access to the detainees, we were generally able to speak briefly to a large number of detainees in their cells and to observe conditions there. Women are held on a separate floor in the same configuration of cells as the men. There is no mistaking Petrou Ralli for anything other than a jail. The detainees are kept in a line of cells along a corridor. Each cell has five cement beds. The three concrete walls of most cells are covered in graffiti; the fourth wall with a barred, locked door is of iron bars and faces the corridor, affording the detainees no privacy. The detainees need to ask for permission every time they want to use the bathroom. The guards allow them out of their cells for two hours a day, but allow them into the rooftop exercise yard for 198 Human Rights Watch interview (name withheld, B-1), Athens, May 23, 2008. 199 Human Rights Watch had brief conversations with about 30-40 detainees at Petrou Ralli through the bars of their cells. These conversations were almost all about conditions at Petrou Ralli, including availability of asylum, and in almost all cases took place without guards being close enough to hear or understand the conversation. Other detailed, confidential interviews about detention at Petrou Ralli include B-9; B-45; B-48; and B-49. 200 Response of the Government of Greece to the Report of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (CPT) on its visit to Greece, Strasbourg, February 8, 2008, p.5, para. 1.a.(1). Stuck in a Revolving Door 80

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