Similarly, people with serious medical conditions also struggle to get proper records of their condition. As discussed in Section 2, the medical care in the Kos PRDC is inadequate and there has been no doctor on site since July 2021. The people interviewed for this report described numerous barriers to accessing proper medical care, and our experience on the ground confirms such reports. Consequently, even if a person does have a medical condition that would qualify them as vulnerable, in many cases this remains undiagnosed and so there is no proof to submit to the authorities. Unlike in cases where people have official vulnerability assessments, these cases present far fewer options for release. Without official proof of vulnerability, those with unsubstantiated vulnerabilities – or their lawyers – have no legal basis to argue that they should be released because they are vulnerable. Further, the police do not conduct any kind of individualized vulnerability assessment or provide additional protection or benefits. legal safeguards, according to the Greek government, they are not vulnerable. This situation has caused immense suffering for our many vulnerable clients detained in the PRDC who have been denied access to proper vulnerability assessments and medical treatment. b. Minors Between January 2020 and April 2021, the authorities regularly detained families with minor children, several of whom were clients of Equal Rights. However, in those cases Equal Rights found that the detention orders did not depart significantly from the other generic detention orders. For example, in one case Equal Rights represented a single woman with three minor children between the ages of 8 and 14 who was detained after her asylum application was rejected. In her case, her detention order did not make any mention of if there were other, less coercive measures available or whether detention was in the children’s best interest. In fact, the detention order only mentioned the three children to state that the client was accompanied by her children. In April 2021, the police released all families from the PRDC and since then they have not detained families with minor children, except for in one case where a family refused to apply for asylum. Additional details regarding the detention conditions for minors are provided in Section 2 below. As for unaccompanied minors, recognised unaccompanied minors are not detained in the PRDC. Instead, they are accommodated in the “safe zone” inside the RIC. However, as has long been documented throughout Greece, the process for recognising unaccompanied minors is extremely flawed and frequently leads to the authorities concluding that applicants for asylum are adults when they are, in fact, minors.141 In the period covered in this report, Equal Rights has represented one client in the PRDC who claimed to be a minor and was able to provide original documentation to support his age. Equal Rights is also aware of at least two people in similar situations. In the case that Equal Rights represented, the applicant was already in the age assessment procedure when it undertook the case – meaning that the authorities had some doubt as to his age. However, he was still detained in the PRDC, in direct violation of Article 75 (3) (d) IPA, which provides that “until the age determination procedure is completed, the person claiming to be a minor shall be treated as a minor”142. In other words, applicants in the age assessment procedure cannot be detained except for exceptional reasons. In our case, the police agreed to release the applicant while his age assessment procedure was ongoing, but our intervention revealed that they were not even aware that he was in the age 141 HIAS, Communication in accordance with Rule 9.2 of the Rules of the Committee of Ministers regarding the supervision of the execution of judgments and of terms of friendly settlements by HIAS GREECE in the M.S.S. and Rahimi Groups v. Greece (August 2020), 20, available at: https://bit.ly/3v9tNuw, Human Rights Watch, Greece: Lone Migrant Children Left Unprotected (19 July 2017), available at: https://bit.ly/2YTEFRc. European Committee of Social Rights, Observations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (16 August 2019), 4, available at: https://bit.ly/3Dt1BWi. 142 Art. 75 (3) (d) L. 4636/2019. 20 DETENTION OF MIGRANTS ON THE ISLAND OF KOS