The special holding facility on the island of Mytilini, the Pagani detention centre, was a converted agro-industrial warehouse, which, with some refurbishment was turned into a detention facility in 2003. CPT delegations consistently found dysfunctional or no heating systems, no warm water, broken windows, decrepit and an insufficient number of mattresses, along with severe overcrowding. On the eve of 2005, Pagani was holding 588 people in a site designed with a capacity for 200. During a CPT visit in 2009 ‘141 women, babies and children [out of a total of 578] were being held together in a room with waste water seeping onto the mattresses, only one small electric water heater available, windows lacking panes, insufficient provision of blankets and a single functioning toilet’. In 2008, 600 residents at Pagani were poisoned because dilapidated drinking water pipes were contaminated. There were indeed serious concerns about the quality of drinking water and food in all the detention centres on the islands of Chios, Samos and Militini.

The dark cells of Pagani resembled large, cold and damp storage rooms. During the winter heating was inadequate and during summer months the lack of ventilation system made internal temperatures dangerously hot. Compounding matters, people detained there in extreme overcrowding conditions were never let out in the fresh air. The resulting stench became unbearable. At one point, in 2007, the Pagani centre had only six officers on duty for 548 detainees. Under such conditions, any attempt to offer acceptable social and medical care, was bound to fail. As Evgenia Iliadou, an NGO practitioner at the centre from 2008 until 2010, reports, the police would only allow her to speak to migrants through the barred doors allegedly for her security. There was only one doctor who remained there for a limited amount of time.

As in other detention centres, ill-treatment allegations from this site are legion. Two persons claimed a senior police officer inflicted blows upon them with a wooden baton, following a hunger strike in early July 2005. The CPT delegation found a baton, as described by the detainees, behind a chair in the guard’s room, which the guards explained was used only to ‘intimidate detainees.’ In fact, as academics Stratos Georgoulas and Dimos Sarantidis also document, incidents of physical and verbal abuse following hunger strikes or simple demands for more information about their cases, were systematic and brutal. While most detainees did not want to report the incidents for fear of retribution, cases that were indeed investigated concluded that ‘violence was used but it was not excessive and rather necessary.’

Within this context, resistance flourished. In the summer of 2009, the no borders movement that arrived on the island contributed decisively into making the Pagani case widely known at a European level. Following many allegations of human rights violations and a visit by the Deputy Minister for Citizen Protection, Spiros Vougias, in November 2009, the infamous centre on the island of Lesvos, Pagani, which was associated with extreme violations of human rights, was officially closed. ‘Conditions are abhorrent, inhumane and offend the core of human dignity’ said the Minister after its visit committing to change reception conditions in the country. The centre remained opened until August 2010.