Detention conditions in Athens airport SHOCKING!

Nothing has changed! As it appears in a letter of complaint by the Greek NGO “Medical Intervention” the detention conditions of Athens Airport continue to be inhuman and degrading.

On June 28, 2012, during one of their daily visits in the detention centre of the airport the Greek NGO “Medical Intervention” (Ιατρική Παρέμβαση) received the intense complaints of the responsible officer of the Asylum office of the airport police, who was angry that one of the detainees had been provided for with information on the asylum procedure. Following this incident, the NGO decided to write a letter of complaint to the responsible Brigadier Mr. Tserlendakis. In this letter the NGO highlighted various shocking problems the detainees have to encounter:
- asylum applications are often registered very late – most of the times only after the intervention of the NGO
- the NGO has problems in providing the detainees with social information and medical aid since the officers obviously questions the reason of existence of the service providers in the detention centre.
- Detainees are not transferred to hospitals for further examinations (i.e. X-rays)
- In case after repeated interventions a person is successfully examined in a hospital, the medical documents get lost in the building – in most of the times they have not been brought along from the hospitals by the officers.
- The detainees complain that they can only access the toilettes three times a day, they have to eat their meals with their hands. There are only two toilettes and two showers for an average of 60 detainees and they are also not clean. Metrasses and sheets are not renewed so that most detainees suffer from dermatological diseases.

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