as long as 10 months (CPT, 2001c). Severe overcrowding in police stations is a recurring finding in the Committee’s reports. Often the detainees had to sleep in chairs, in corridors or had to fight to get a mattress. Police facilities were in general very dirty, infested with parasites and dilapidated with severe lack of means for enabling persons in police custody to maintain their personal hygiene. None of the places the CPT visited possessed the necessary facilities to enable detainees to take exercise in the open air. Instead, the Greek authorities claimed, ‘there is a daily schedule for the detainees to get out and spend time in the spacious corridor of their wards’ (CPT, 2001b, p. 18). The situation prevailing in all police establishments were often qualified in CPT reports as inhuman and degrading. For example, during the CPT’s first visit to Ellinikon Alien’s Holding Centre, the delegation observed people sleeping on mattresses on the floor and that they had no access to outdoor exercise. Three years later, and despite assurances from the Greek authorities that these lacunae would soon be remedied during a second visit to Ellinikon, the CPT delegation discovered that mattresses were still placed on the floor, sanitary facilities were in poor state and hygiene products were not in stock (CPT, 2001c). The image of the 'primitive Albanian', that was so fervently evoked in media representations and accounts by border guards of uncatchable animal-like creatures, as King et al. (1998) implied in their biographical account of one migrant’s journey from Albania to Athens, were used to justify their inhuman treatment. This applies equally to the Greek police intent on expelling them and to Greek employers determined to exploiting their labour, asserted Gabriella Lazaridis (1996) in her attempt to record the experience of Albanian migrant labourers in the country. The below excerpt from CPT’s report after a visit in 1997 of the Ioannina Centre for ‘Illegal’ Immigrants, which was used to detain Albanians before they were transferred back to the other side of the border is particularly telling in revealing how deep-seated was the belief of this particular nationality as an inferior underclass. ‘The foreign nationals were kept in an unfurnished room measuring about 16 m², in which they paddled around in several centimetres of murky water containing various forms of rubbish. The water came from the adjacent primitive toilet (consisting of an opening giving directly onto the canalisation system), which had been blocked up with the aid of plastic bottles to prevent rodents from passing through. The smell in the room was quite simply appalling and it swarmed with insects. In addition, there was no access to running or drinking water; the former had apparently 72