XII. Detention in Greece The Evros Region Border Police Stations Migrants interviewed by Human Rights Watch who spoke about being arrested and detained in the Evros border region often said that the police did not fingerprint or register them, and also described abusive treatment and poor conditions in the police stations.156 Most of the people Human Rights Watch interviewed who had been detained in police stations in the Evros border region did not know the name of the place where they were detained and many were unclear about dates and other details. This was particularly true for people who had made multiple attempts to enter Greece and who had been summarily returned and/or detained multiple times. One such account comes from the 28-year-old Iraqi man with scars from a bomb explosion, previously quoted, who was arrested and expelled in two unsuccessful attempts to enter Greece 157 and then detained again in each of three attempts to leave Greece from Patras. On his third, successful attempt to enter Greece, he walked for 15 days (actually only at night) and reached Thessaloniki. He doesn’t know where he was taken, but he describes it thus: The Thessaloniki police arrested me and took me to a place called a camp, but it was really a jail. I was held there for 35 days. We kept it clean ourselves. There were many nationalities there, a lot of Albanians. Every room had 15 or 20 people. There were a lot of rooms. We stayed inside the whole time. We never saw the sun in 35 days. I was hungry. There was not enough food to eat. Those who had money could pay the guards to buy food from the outside. Even the bought food was bad; the chicken still had blood in it. 156 Human Rights Watch’s findings are consistent with those of a delegation from the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) of the European Parliament, which found that migrants in the Evros region “are arrested and detained in small police stations. In many cases, their identity is not registered and they are not informed about their rights. They are simply expelled to Turkey.” Report from the LIBE Committee Delegation on the Visit to Greece, Brussels, July 17, 2007, European Parliament, PV\677898EN.doc, PE 392.010v03-00, p. 9. 157 See his testimony, above, at Turkey’s Border-Enforcement Response to Greek Expulsions and Pushbacks. Stuck in a Revolving Door 68