21 5. Registration and screening: A wheel of misfortune ■ Upon arrest, irregular migrants have to fill in a first registration form in the presence of the authorities. This takes place either outside the detention centre (on a field, in the court yard etc.), or inside the cells and through the bars. The detainees’ personal data is not kept confidential. In the area of Evros there’s no systematic screening procedure. Nothing but the nationality is identified. There’s no proper age assessment, no identification of vulnerable persons, such as children, trafficked women, people in need of international protection. »When I was arrested and brought to Soufli, an officer asked me in English for my first name, family name, my age and my nationality. I told him I was born in 1994. Only when I received the white paper I saw that they wrote I was born in 1986.«58 As it seems, the first registration procedure in the detention centres of Evros is a wheel of (mis-) fortune. It seems that in the registration of nationalities Frontex de facto takes the most important role. According to Frontex, its specialised interview officers are accompanied by interpreters, who always work in cooperation with Greek officers. In practice Frontex suggests the nationality of the detainees and the Greek authorities take this suggestion for granted since they don’t have their own interpreters. But there’s no clear or specific rule how to proceed in the screening of the migrants’ identities. The law does not offer any legal remedy against false registration/screening. The registration of nationality and age Evros’ detention centres raises serious concerns about the quality and the credibility of the procedure. During our missions, we came to the conclusion that sometimes Frontex executes the nationality and age screening along with Greek officers, on other occasions Frontex or the Greek police do it on their own. The same applies to the interpreters: Sometimes interpreters are present, on other occasionsthey are not. Sometimes interpreters speak the dialect or the language of the apprehended foreigner, sometimes they do not. There are no guarantees that the material (like questionnaires, maps and pictures), which 58 H.F. from Iraq; December 19, 2010 – Soufli 59 This screening material is being used in the region of Evros at least since the summer of 2010. It includes questions such as: »What colours does your national flag have?« or »Where exactly is the village you are from? Show me on the map.« Frontex has marked their room of registration in Tyhero Frontex provides for the registration procedure59, is not used arbitrarily. The screening material is inappropriate for illiterate people or for those who have lived for long periods as refugees in other countries, thus not being able to give the proper answer to geographical, political and cultural questions. There are repeated cases of wrong nationality registration of Afghans who had been living for long periods in Iran. Many of them were initially registered as Iranians. There are also many cases of Palestinians who are registered as Iraqis, Syrians etc. One concern is also that in most cases the identification procedure lasts something between 5 to 10 minutes. In informal interviews by Pro Asyl in November 2010, German Frontex officers expressed their doubts on the effectiveness of such a short identification procedure. According to the officers, in Germany a procedure of this kind would take a whole working day.60 60 http://www.proasyl.de/fileadmin/fmdam/a_Startseite_und_ Aktionsseiten/Startseite/2010__ab_April_/Evros_Reise bericht_2010.pdf