'Inhuman' conditions for migrants in Greece: UN expert

(ATHENS) - Detention conditions in Greece for migrants are frequently "inhuman" due to "filthy overcrowded detention facilities", poor police training and a huge spike in arrivals, a UN official said Wednesday, calling for EU assistance.

United Nations special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak also said he had received "consistent" allegations of police beatings, and that at one Athens precinct, police kept a hard line on migrants for fear of far-right militants.

"The time has come for urgent measures to fundamentally restructure the whole way of how asylum seekers and migrants are dealt with," Nowak told a news conference at the end of a 10-day mission to Greece.

"I appeal to the European Union, and the Commission in particular, to assist the government... they are in need of very substantial financial and technical assistance so that the crisis can be solved," he said.

The UN fact-finding mission visited five prisons, nine police stations, two border stations, three migrant detention centres and three hospitals.

In most cases, it recorded severe overcrowding at both jails and police stations. Some police detention cells, where migrants can be kept for up to two weeks, sleeping on benches or on the floor, were so overcrowded and filthy that the UN mission had difficulty breathing, the UN rapporteur said.

"Very often, I was told that cleaning personnel do not dare any more go into these filthy overcrowded detention facilities," Nowak said. "The hygienic conditions are simply indescribable."

At the detention cells of Athens International Airport -- which were built to house 18 people in groups of two -- the mission found 88 detainees. As only two bathrooms are available, the detainees regularly urinate in bottles.

"This is by itself inhuman," Nowak said.

To improve conditions, the UN official said asylum procedures ought to be transferred to civil authorities and that the health ministry should be placed in charge of health care in prisons and police facilities.

He also called for the establishment of an independent police complaints commission to investigate claims of abuse.

According to Greek figures sent to the UN, from 2003 to 2007 only one officer was dismissed out of 238 police ill-treatment investigations, he said.

"We found persons with injuries too afraid to allow a forensic examination, too afraid to speak even," Nowak said. "That is a very negative signal."

But police say they also feel pressured into a hard line, he said.

In one Athens district with a high migrant population that has seen frequent clashes and attacks on foreigners, high-level officers said they felt "at risk" from far-right groups and could not afford to be seen as soft, Nowak said.

About 300-400 persons enter Greece illegally every day, not counting those returned by other European Union states under current EU migration regulations, known as the Dublin II system, Nowak said.

The police this week said they had caught more than 96,000 irregular migrants in the first nine months of the year, and that arrests on the Greek-Turkish border had spiked by nearly 400 percent compared to the equivalent period last year.

The authorities attribute the increase to the success of Greek-EU patrols in patrolling the waters around Aegean Sea islands which were hitherto used by people smugglers to land migrants.

In recent years Greece has had one of Europe's lowest asylum approval rates, with only 0.9 percent of applications accepted.