Out of the spotlight: The rights of foreigners and minorities are still a grey area the report concluded that the programme had failed to reach its stated goals and thus to ensure that the street children it was targeting would not be subjected to further trafficking and forced labour, primarily because of the absence in the planning stages of regulatory provisions to ensure the success of the programme. The report noted that in the plan of the programme, there had been no provision for any form of extra funding from the state. As a result, the programme lacked from the outset necessary resources, in equipment and personnel, to deal with the specific requirements of the programme. The children were simply collected from the street by police and placed in an institution (Aghia Varvara) that had been operating as a female boarding school since 1948 and which had been undersubscribed. In addition, the authorities had not taken measures to protect the children in the institutions from abduction and had failed, in the absence of provisions in the plan for children above 12 years of age, to observe the age limit set out in the plan. In their recommendations, both the Ombudsman and ‘Terres des Hommes’ emphasized the importance of ensuring the security of minors in institutionalized care and the need for substantial revisions to the existing legislative and policy framework for combating child trafficking. Specifically, the Ombudsman’s report noted that “protection and social care for victims of child trafficking should not be provided through one-off and perhaps even opportunistic programmes, but within the framework of a unified and organized national policy”. Amnesty International has urged the Greek authorities to conduct a thorough, prompt and impartial judicial investigation in order to establish the fate and current whereabouts of the children and to ensure their safety. After a preliminary investigation, on 1 December 2004 the prosecutor pressed felony charges “against and Samantha Stratithaki for the Rights of the Child Department, Ombudsman’s Office, Greece, March 2004. Amnesty International 5 October 2005 35 anyone involved” in the “abduction of children less than 14 years of age”. An investigative judge was assigned to carry out the main investigation. In April 2005 the Greek Ombudsman met with the Albanian Ombudsman and provided him with a list of the missing children. The latter launched an effort to locate them or their families. Amnesty International has since been informed that more than a dozen children were already located in Albania. In addition, an agreement has been drafted between Greek and Albanian authorities regarding cooperation in combating child trafficking between the two countries and providing more effective mechanisms for the protection of unaccompanied children, trafficked children and children at risk of being trafficked. 66According to information that was published in the Albanian press in August 2005, 67 the Albanian Prosecutor General’s Office addressed their Greek counterpart on five occasions about this case in the last two years, but received no reply. 2.4 Police ill-treatment In addition to these observations, the delegation of Amnesty International also received a number of complaints about the illtreatment of migrants by police officers. The most widely publicized incident of such illtreatment took place in December 2004. On 13 December 2004 a number of men in plain clothes entered a guesthouse in Athens, where a number of Afghan migrants were staying, identified themselves as police officers and showed the Afghan migrants a photograph of another man who had earlier escaped from police custody in the Agios 66 Draft Cooperation Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Albania and the Government of the Republic of Greece on the protection of unaccompanied children, trafficked children and children at risk of being trafficked. 67 “Athina si përgjigjet Tiranës për zhdukjen e 300 fëmijëve”, Metropol, 31 August 2005. AI Index: EUR 25/016/2005