offered a lawyer only after receiving her first rejection. Making detained persons aware of our services early in their procedure is therefore still a challenge. Regarding access to lawyers for the appeal procedure, Equal Rights frequently hears from clients that they will request a lawyer for their appeal and are told by the police that either one is not available or that they do not have a right to one. In some cases, clients have reported that the police told them they would help them find one, but never followed up, so they had to submit the appeal on their own in order to meet the 10-day deadline. Finally, we have also experienced various issues with gaining access to clients in detention to conduct legal counselling sessions. Although the police generally approve lawyers’ requests to meet with clients in detention, they generally require two-days’ notice to schedule an appointment and urgent appointments are challenging to arrange. Various issues for lawyers often arise inside the PRDC as wel. Upon entering the facility at the designated time and date, we are frequently asked to wait up to an hour and a half to meet with our clients, on the premise that the meeting container is occupied by other professionals. Meanwhile, when we have requested particular dates and times that we have been told are unavailable, we have arrived to find the meeting container completely empty. During consultations, we are frequently refused sufficient chairs for ourselves, our clients and interpreters. Several police officers stand outside the meeting container, in full view of the meeting rooms, during advice sessions, which can be intimidating to our clients. On multiple occasions, police have peered into the windows of the meeting container or have even entered the meeting room without warning during our advice sessions with little respect for our confidentiality. On 20 February 2021, police walked in and out of our meeting with a client – who identifies as LGBTI and is an SGBV survivor – at least 5 times, while he was discussing his sexual orientation and experience of SGBV. Additionally, one of the two rooms in the meeting container does not have a door, and police frequently walk by to use the bathroom. In our experience, police interfere with our client meetings more often than not. As a result, the process of meeting and working with clients in detention is unnecessarily complicated and hinders our ability to provide confidential advice and obtain and maintain our clients’ trust. bb. Accelerated procedures for new arrivals and lack of access to legal counsel Since opening our Kos office in January 2021, we have observed that many new arrivals to Kos enter the asylum procedure while in pre-detention quarantine. Without access to their phones, information regarding the asylum procedure, or available legal services on the island, new arrivals are often unable to access legal advice prior to their pre-registration, or even their registration. This practice can cause procedural complications that are difficult to later rectify, and that can have harmful consequences for applicants’ chances of success in the asylum procedure. One of our clients, who arrived in Kos in March 2021, disclosed during his ‘pre-registration’ procedure that he was Syrian. During his registration, he was consequently registered as a Syrian national. We learned only after his registration that he was actually Palestinian-Syrian and did not have Syrian citizenship. While we lobbied to have our client re-registered as Palestinian, a procedural change that ultimately ensured that he obtained refugee status, our client would likely have been incorrectly interviewed and erroneously rejected without our intervention,.183 Entering the asylum procedure 183 At the time, Palestinian refugees born in Syria were not subject to the same admissibility procedure on Kos that other Syrians had to undergo. Under this admissibility procedure, Syrians were screened to see whether their applications were admissible, i.e. whether Turkey was a safe third country for them. A report published by Equal Rights in July 2021 found that the authorities rejected almost all Syrians under the admissibility procedure. Greta Albertari et. al., Consequences of the EU-Turkey Statement: The Situation of Syrian Asylum Seekers on the Greek Aegean Islands, Equal Rights Beyond Borders ( July 2021), 1, available at: https://bit. ly/3yCnRu4. 27 DETENTION OF MIGRANTS ON THE ISLAND OF KOS