Until April 2019, the island of Kos did not attract many migrants, apart from the summer of 2015. It, therefore, never became an over-researched field-site, like Moria or other border locations. The reception and pre-removal centres were operating at or under capacity levels, and while problems recorded in other islands were also found there, life for migrants and authorities alike seemed uninterrupted by (negative) publicity. This, of course, does not mean that problems did not exist, but that, as Kos was never in the spotlight of either vast humanitarian operations, or media and research attention, it remained an opaque spot of migration governance in Greece.

Before the pre-removal centre opened, irregular migrants were detained in the Police Headquarters, with very little oversight or monitoring. Conditions in this striking 1920s building, which had previously housed the fascist administration during the Italian occupation of the island, the Nazi military services from 1943-1945, and the British administration until 1947, have been described as abhorrent, tragic and unbearable. Most detainees were there for months.

The pre-removal detention centre on the island, which has been operational since 2017, opened amid great fanfare about it being able to ‘deter new migration flows’. It is located right next to the Reception and Identification Centre of the island (now CCAC) and has capacity for 440 men, women and children in seven separate housing units with containers. Each cell contains two bunk beds, as well as a shower and a toilet. In 2018 conditions were evaluated as good by the CPT, while an open regime policy and allowing mobile phones were considered good practices. At the time of the CPT’s visit in 2018, 100 foreign nationals, comprising 85 single men and 15 vulnerable persons (including one family), were being held in the two wings of the centre that were in use.

As arrivals to the Dodecanese and Northern Aegean islands increased in the spring and continued unabated in the summer 2019, reception and therefore detention procedures were significantly burdened. The reception and identification centre (RIC) with a capacity for around 700 people, quickly became overcrowded. At the time of a research visit in September 2019, the centre had reached more than 240% of its capacity levels, with more than 2,410 people residing in the camp, straining the available resources (e.g. toilets and accommodation) and services. With a reception service unprepared, floundering and a congested camp, the authorities resorted to a population exchange between the camp and the detention centre, using the nearby detention facility as a space management tool. While until April 2019, those detained for administrative reasons did not exceed 50, at the time of the visit, the pre-departure centre had reached its capacity. According to its Director, in 2019 the facility had agreed to ‘host’ people from the reception centre for space management reasons in one of its units. Quite expectedly, people had protested against this unlawful procedure and had reportedly destroyed the property, rendering the unit uninhabitable.

According to an AIDA report, by the end of 2018, the ‘pilot project’, i.e. the policy of automatic detention upon arrival for newly arrived persons who belong to a so-called ‘low recognition rate’ nationality was implemented on Kos (as in Lesvos and Leros). On Kos it was only used for nationals of countries with a recognition rate lower than 33%. While the project initially focused on nationals of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, the list of countries was expanded to 28 in March 2017. As the detention manager and UNHCR representatives corroborated to researchers, automatic detention was applied indiscriminately and en masse irrespective of nationality and refugee profile. For example, according to information received from the UNHCR, in the beginning of September there were 87 Syrian nationals detained, as well as families with children. In a case supported by the Greek Council for Refugees, a Syrian national detained immediately after receiving the second-instance negative decision remained in the pre-removal centre of Kos for 12 months, despite the fact that he had submitted an application for annulment and suspension in time. He was only released after the Administrative Court of Rhodes ruled that the prolongation of his detention was not legally justified.

In 2020 many new arrivals were recorded on smaller Dodecanese islands like Symi and Kastellorizo. Those arriving were collected and transferred to Kos with an order to be housed in the reception centre. However, as they were not direct arrivals in Kos, the Director of the Reception Service would not accept them ‘due to lack of space’ and put them through the usual screening process. Thus, they ended up in detention for indeterminate periods of time. Whether they were prosecuted for ‘illegal entry’ and received an expulsion order remained unclear. In an apparent breach of reception regulations, those who were released and not admitted to the camp were left in limbo with nowhere safe to stay. Similarly, those previously detained in the pre-removal centre and released with a geographical restriction decision, ordering the individual not to leave the island and to reside – in most cases – in the RIC, were not accepted in the reception centre either. As the, then, Director of the RIC bluntly put it to our research team ‘We don’t have space for ex-detainees here’ because apparently, they posed security risks. This position is in line with widespread rhetoric that immigrants cannot follow ‘European rules’ and are generally unruly. ‘We tell them not to fight. In Greece, in Europe if we have a problem, we go to the authorities…After some time, the police intervene and arrest them’, confirmed the Director. As the Greek Council of Refugees further observed, people who showed 'delinquent' behavior or caused problems and tensions in the reception centre of Kos, were detained for public security reasons, without being legally prosecuted most of the times.

Partly due to the relatively smaller numbers of arrivals, Kos has been a blind spot of migration governance in Greece, leaving the authorities, namely the First Reception Service and the Police, with a great deal of discretion they use arbitrarily and indiscriminately. In this context, ‘undesirable’ foreigners, who did not fall directly into the bureaucratic procedures of the Greek state or who were deemed to be ‘troublemakers’, did not fit into either the reception or the detention centre on the island. Instead they were tossed around from one authority to the other, while the Directors of the facilities on the island tried to diffuse their personal accountability and responsibility over those people.

A series of reports by Equal Rights Beyond Borders in 2021, 2023 and 2024 paint a similarly bleak picture. In November 2021, the organisation documented a policy of detaining all asylum seekers upon arrival and the continuation of their detention after a second rejection, excluding any possibility of an individualised assessment. More worryingly the report refers to the detention of children, in violation of EU, Greek, and human rights law. The detention conditions described by the organisation's clients and reflected in their own experiences inside the PRDC on Kos neither fulfilled the standards laid down in Greek national law nor under EU law and international human rights law. The human rights standards on nutrition, recreation, access to health care and Covid-19 measures, were not met, especially when considering the cumulative effect of these deficiencies. The 2024 report reiterates similar findings, whereby there are three pathways to detention; (a) the ongoing detention of rejected asylum seekers with no prospect of return, (b) the detention of unregistered asylum seekers charged with illegally staying on the territory, and, (c) the arbitrary detention of registered asylum seekers accused of low-level crimes, abusing the term 'threat to public order.'In line with the conclusions in this series of reports, the conditions in the Kos PRDC amount to inhumane and degrading treatment, violate individuals’ fundamental rights, and raise serious doubts over Greece’s commitment to upholding its obligations under International, EU, and domestic law.