fundamental rights emergency. People, including pregnant women and families with small children, are held in inhumane conditions.” The report also specifically references Frontex.65 Leszek Szymanksi, the Frontex official who had visited the Greek migrant detention facilities in Evros prior to the Frontex deployment, was in the region when the FRA was carrying out its inspections. In light of the cooperation agreement between Frontex and the FRA,66 Szymanksi accompanied FRA during some parts of its visits to detention centers in late January 2011, including Fylakio.67 The agency evaluated the RABIT deployment and found its presence to have a positive impact in some areas, for example saying that its engagement in processing of individuals “seem[s] to have reduced the risk of informal push-backs to Turkey for persons who have crossed irregularly into Greece.”68 The FRA report is highly critical of the inhuman and degrading conditions in detention centers in Greece, but declined to address Frontex’s role in transferring migrants to authorities who will subject them to inhuman and degrading detention, saying that this falls outside its mandate: The operational assistance provided by the EU through Frontex covers only initial processing and does not impact on the most critical fundamental rights concern – the inhuman conditions in which persons are currently being held, because the reception of persons crossing the borders irregularly is seen as falling outside the mandate of Frontex.69 FRA’s report on the rights emergency in Greece is a damning one and provides a useful critique and action plan of what is wrong in Greece. However the FRA missed an opportunity to address a significant contributing factor to the level of detainees held in inhuman and degrading conditions by failing to examine the role Frontex’s operations play in transferring migrants to detention centers with conditions that the EU rights agency characterized as inhumane. 65 The Fundamental Rights Agency, “Coping with a Fundamental Rights Emergency,” March 8, 2011, http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/media/pr-080311_en.htm (accessed April 13, 2011) (Below: “FRA report”). 66 See the Fundamental Rights Agency section, above. 67 Interview with Wahlström, February 15, 2011. 68 Ibid., FRA report, p. 9. For more on informal push-backs to Turkey, see Greece/Turkey – Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and Other Asylum Seekers and Migrants at the Greece/Turkey Entrance to the European Union, November 2008, pp. 32-47, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/11/26/stuck-revolving-door-0, and Unsafe and Unwelcoming Shores, October 2009, http://www.hrw.org/en/node/86025. 69 FRA report, p. 9. THE EU’S DIRTY HANDS 26