M.S.S. v. BELGIUM AND GREECE JUDGMENT 33 children. I go up to the second level: a Sri Lankan man with an infectious disease is being held in isolation in a small bungalow. The hangar where the women and children are held is the only open one. There are beds, but not enough, so there are mattresses on the bare concrete floor. It is late summer, but everyone complains that they are cold and there are not enough blankets. The last jail, the one for minors. There are 125 of them. ...” In his report dated February 2009, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights stated: “During the meeting with the Commissioner, the authorities in Evros department informed him that as at 1 December 2008 there were 449 irregular migrants detained by the police in six different places of detention in that department. The five most common nationalities were: Iraq (215), Afghanistan (62), Georgia (49), Pakistan (37) and Palestine (27). On 9 December 2008, date of the Commissioner’s visit, at the two separate warehouse-type detention rooms of the Feres border guard station, which dates from 2000, there were 45 young, male, irregular migrants in detention, most of them Iraqis. ... They were in fact crammed in the rooms, sleeping and stepping upon mattresses that had been placed on the floor and on a cement platform, one next to the other. In the bathrooms the conditions were squalid. Some detainees had obvious skin rashes on their arms and one with bare feet complained that the authorities did not provide him with shoes and clean clothes. ... On 9 December 2008 the police authorities informed the Commissioner that at Kyprinos (Fylakio) there were 320 inmates in seven detention rooms, the majority of them being of Iraqi and Afghan nationalities.” 164. The CPT visited the detention centre next to Athens International Airport in 2005. It noted: “The conditions in the separate cell block are of concern to the CPT’s delegation. Each cell (measuring 9.5 sq. m) had an official capacity of five persons, already too high. In fact, the registers showed that on many occasions, for example in May and June 2005, the occupancy rate reached six and even as high as nine persons per cell. An examination of the cells seemed to indicate that originally they had been designed for one person as there was only a single plinth in the cells – certainly no more than three persons, preferably no more than two, should be held overnight in such cells. The sanitary facilities were outside the cells and the delegation heard many complaints that the police guards did not respond rapidly to requests to go to the toilet; further, access to the shower appeared extremely limited, and five persons, in the same cell, claimed they had not had a shower in seven days – the overbearing hot, sweaty stench lent much credence to their allegation. The delegation also met a man who had spent one and a half months in one of the cells with no change of clothes, no access to fresh air nor any exercise nor any purposeful activity.” Following its visit to Greece in 2007, the CPT noted that there had been no improvement as regards the manner in which persons detained were treated and reported cases of ill-treatment at the hands of the police officers in the deportation cell at Athens International Airport: “At Petru Rali Alien detention facility, a Bangladeshi national alleged that he had been slapped and kicked by the escorting police officers in the deportation cell at Athens International Airport after he had refused deportation. He further alleged that they had compressed his throat, pressed their fingers into his eye sockets, twisted his hands behind his back and kicked him on the back of the legs, the buttocks and in the

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