News

Greek minister's shame at immigration detention

Friday, 27 February 2015

In the current issue of London Review of Books, Daniel Trilling reports on his visit to the notorious Amygdaleza immigration detention centre on the outskirts of Athens.

Last month, the newly-appointed minister for public order, Yannis Panousis, visited Amygdaleza to express his 'shame, not as a minister but as a human being’ that the detention centre existed. He said he planned to shut it down within a hundred days.

Describing the pens in which migrants are held for months, sometimes years, Trilling writes:

'Inside the pens, each of which was no more than twenty metres across, were two or three converted shipping containers, in which the inmates – all men – lived. To Vima alleged that in the summer, the police had turned off the air-conditioning, and temperatures inside the containers approached 50°C. Some of the containers had been burned during the August riots and their walls were buckled and blackened, but people still appeared to be living in them.

Read the whole article here.