H UMA N R I G H TS WATCH 350 Fifth Avenue, 34 th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 H U M A N www.hrw.org W A T C H The EU’s Dirty Hands Frontex Involvement in Ill-Treatment of Migrant Detainees in Greece In November 2010, the European Union’s (EU) agency for the management of operational cooperation at external borders, Frontex, began providing Greece with manpower and material support to patrol its borders along the Evros River with Turkey. This report assesses Frontex’s involvement in, and responsibility for, exposing migrants detained by border patrols to inhuman and degrading conditions of detention in Greece’s overcrowded migrant detention centers in northeastern Greece. Frontex deployed 175 border guards, chosen from a pool provided by participating European states as part of a rapid border intervention team (RABIT). During the four months examined in this report, RABIT patrols regularly apprehended migrants and took them, sometimes in buses provided by Frontex, to the detention centers. RABIT has been replaced by a permanent Frontex presence. During the RABIT deployment, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued a judgment, M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece, which found that conditions in Greek migrant detention centers were inhuman and degrading and that Belgium violated its human rights obligations by knowingly exposing an Afghan asylum seeker to inhuman and degrading treatment when it transferred him back to Greece. 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. Human Rights Watch contends that Frontex is similarly responsible for having knowingly exposed migrants to treatment which is absolutely prohibited under human rights law. This report argues that Frontex should immediately make its engagement in border enforcement operations in Greece contingent on the placement of apprehended migrants in facilities with decent conditions either by transferring them to other areas of Greece where detention standards meet human rights requirements or by making detention spaces available in other places in the EU where conditions meet international and EU standards. Since November 2010, Frontex, the EU’s border agency, has deployed “guest officers” seconded from other European states, to assist Greece in patrolling its land borders. Migrants detained by patrols are transferred to detention centers in Greece where the conditions of detention are so poor that they are deemed inhuman and degrading. © 2011 Associated Press R I G H T S