than at the jail. They are permitted to exercise in the yard in the mornings, and migrants said that the guards there treated them decently. The Athens Area (Attica Prefecture)194 Athens Airport There are at least two detention facilities that migrants refer to as airport detention: one is a small holding area in the international departures section of the Eleftherios Venizelos airport that is comprised of a few cells where detainees are usually held for not more than a few days; the other is a jail near the old airport of Elliniko at the south of Athens near a former U.S. military base where migrants are held longer. Migrants are sometimes transported from one airport detention facility to the other (and in some cases to a third facility, the local police station at Elliniko where undocumented migrants are also detained), so there is sometimes a bit of confusion about which one is being described. Nevertheless, quite a number of interviewees told Human Rights Watch about their experiences of detention in one or another of these facilities.195 Some who wind up in the airport jails are people who are caught trying to leave with improper travel documents, who are held pending a court appearance to be prosecuted for using false documents or illegal entry or exit. Others are people returned from other European countries under the Dublin II regulation. The 28-year-old Sabean from Baghdad who was quoted above about his deportation to Turkey stayed for one month at the Athens airport jail.196 He described the airport jail as “a very dirty place. It was crowded with many people of all nationalities, but the worst thing was the dirt and the insects. The toilets were very dirty with no doors.”197 A 24-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad who was arrested with a fake passport when he tried to leave Greece in October 2007 described drunken guards and filthy conditions at the small airport detention center: 194 Human Rights Watch also toured the Amygdaleza youth detention facility and interviewed detainees and staff there. The report of that visit appears in Left to Survive: Protection Breakdown for Unaccompanied Children in Greece. 195 Consistent Human Rights Watch interviews with the quoted testimony includes B-1; B-2; B-3; B-11; B-20; B-23; B-46; S-139; and S-140. 196 See above, Returns under the Greece-Turkey Readmission Agreement and Overland Deportations from Turkey. 197 Human Rights Watch interview (name withheld, B-13), Athens, May 24, 2008. 79 Human Rights Watch November 2008