IV. SECTION II: HUMAN RIGHTS WHILE IN DETENTION: DETENTION CONDITIONS & OBLIGATIONS TO FULFIL & PROTECT Section 2 documents the living conditions for people detained in the Kos PRDC. Greek, EU, and human rights law all require the state to provide a certain standard of living to detained migrants, regardless of whether the detention is lawful or not. The first subsection explores the legal guarantees afforded to migrants in detention in Greece, both in general as well as the additional guarantees provided for vulnerable persons. The second subsection provides a detailed analysis of the actual living conditions inside the Kos PRDC. This analysis is drawn primarily from first-hand testimonies provided to us during in-depth interviews and divided into 10 themes that were frequently mentioned. Based on those interviews along with our experiences working Kos, Section 2 ultimately concludes that the living conditions in the Kos PRDC fall far below the standards required by law. A. Introduction to the Kos PRDC The Kos PRDC opened on 30 March 2017.191 According to Greek government statistics, the facility has capacity to hold 474 people.192 As of 16 October 2021, 165 people were detained in the Kos PRDC, according to official government statistics.193 The PRDC and RIC are located next to one another on a former military base in Pyli, a small village 15 kilometres from Kos Town.194 The Regional Asylum Office is housed inside the premises of the RIC. The EU Hotspot itself was opened in March 2016, in response to the EU-Turkey deal.195 Due to its relatively low number of arrivals, Kos has attracted little attention compared to other border locations and reporting on the island remains limited.196 Even so, existing reports indicate that the same concerns raised with regard to the Greek detention estate more broadly – such as unlawful and arbitrary detention practices, poor living conditions, and inaccessible legal remedies – also exist on Kos. In 2018, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles reported that there was no doctor or psychiatrist in the Kos detention centre.197 In September 2019, an Open Society Foundation (OSF) funded-delegation reported that asylum seekers were unlawfully detained in Kos in the absence of viable alternative accommodation.198 The Kos RIC, built for around 800 people, accommodated more than 2,410.199 In the words of OSF, “authorities resorted to a population exchange between the camp and the detention centre, using the nearby detention facility as a space management tool”.200 In April 2020, Refugee Rights Europe reported that the Kos centre held 447 people in a space for 474, and an additional three people in police detentionRefugee Rights Europe reported that new arrivals to the island in March 2020 were placed directly in detention, without being 191 RSA, Greece: Back to Detention (13 April 2017), available at: https://bit.ly/3kPikv3. 192 General Secretariat for Information and Communication, National Situational Picture Regarding the Islands at Eastern Aegean Sea (05/08/2021), available at: https://bit.ly/3BDNvAf. 193 Official Greek Government statistics on the Eastern Aegean islands can be found at the following link: https://bit.ly/3Gz9T1k. 194 Refugee Rights Europe, The Invisible Islands: Covid-19 Restrictions and the Future of Detention Kos and Leros, 6, available at: https://bit. ly/3gYol7H. 195 Ibid. 196 Adriani Fili, Ending Up in Detention on the Island of Kos: The ‘Undesirable’ Foreigners, University of Oxford Border Criminologies (20 November 2019), available at: https://bit.ly/2WLJTxi. 197 AIDA, Country Report: Greece (December 2018), 18, available at: https://bit.ly/2YbBYtD 198 Adriani Fili, Ending Up in Detention on the Island of Kos: The ‘Undesirable’ Foreigners, University of Oxford Border Criminologies (20 November 2019), available at: https://bit.ly/2WLJTxi. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid. 34 DETENTION OF MIGRANTS ON THE ISLAND OF KOS