provide detainees in Greece at least with some hope that they will be released. However, since Greece usually does not carry out expulsions but rather releases migrants with a white paper notifying them to self deport, in practice migrants are rearrested and subjected to multiple detentions. In the aggregate, this means they are held longer than these time limits. While Human Rights Watch, therefore, does not regard inhuman and degrading treatment as systemic in Greece, it is also not uncommon. The risk of such treatment is particularly real at the airport where Dublin II returnees first arrive and in police stations in the border region where migrants from Turkey are often first apprehended and detained. Therefore, and in consideration of their own non-refoulement obligations, EU member and EU neighboring states that participate in the Dublin system should exercise the sovereignty clause of Dublin II and suspend transfers of asylum seekers to Greece. They should choose to resume such transfers only when Greece shows that it has met EU standards for conditions of detention, police conduct, access to asylum and other forms of protection, and the fair exercise of asylum procedures, and when Greece stops its practice of forcibly returning non-nationals who would thereby face persecution, torture, or inhuman and degrading treatment in Turkey or their countries of origin.214 214 This is suggested by at least 33 “interim measures” ordered by the European Court of Human Rights, as of September 2008, to prevent specific EU states (mostly the U.K. and Finland) from returning individual asylum seekers (mostly Iraqis) to Greece under the Dublin II regulation pending a full determination of the real risk of inhuman and degrading treatment. Although not an absolute finding, the Court is convinced that there remains enough of a risk of inhuman and degrading treatment to halt return to Greece at this preliminary stage. 85 Human Rights Watch November 2008

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