FIDH Oral statement for Panel on human rights of migrants in detention centers
The conditions of detention of migrants remain worrying in many countries, including in member states of the European Union. The return directive of illegal immigrants adopted in 2008, entails the possibility to jail undocumented migrants for up to 18 months before their expulsion. FIDH and its members organisations in Belgium, Greece and France are deeply concerned by the fact that the imprisonment of illegal migrants seems to be envisaged in many European countries as the only mechanism of migration control.
In Greece, documentations of ill-treatment of immigrants by Greek police are considerable. European Commission Vice-President Franco Frattini, has expressed "concern" about the alleged ill-treatment of immigrants in detention centres in Greece. A ruling by the European Court of Human Rights concluded in June 2009 that the conditions of detention of asylum seekers, including the lack of medical assistance, the lack of possibility to exercise, and the impossibility of establishing contact with the outside world, combined with the excessive length of detention in such conditions, amounted to degrading treatment.
In Belgium, despite legal provisions limiting the detention period to eight months, the Belgian authorities’ practice to ‘reset the counters to zero’ when a foreigner objects to his/her deportation enables a detention for an unlimited period. In the absence of a transparent, independent and impartial complaint system, the migrants encounter in practice many difficulties to lodge an appeal. The external monitoring of deportations has as well been deemed as inadequate by the Comity Against Torture in November 2008. Only sporadic controls are organized during the deportation and NGOs lack access to the deportation zone.
In France, the policy towards associations working in waiting zones and retention centres is getting more and more restrictive. Concerning information on the rights of migrants in retention centers, the way in which the « monopole » of the migrants help association « Cimade » was undermined comes close to an obvious intention to weaken the exercice of the rights of migrants. Furthermore, in the waiting zone of Roissy airport, where 96% of asylum seekers arriving by air currently enter the French territory, associations have no access to persons « under procedure », which means during the few hours upon their arrival in France, while they are being heard by the Boarder Police, or during the few hours preceding their refoulement.
We therefore call upon the Council to adopt a resolution establishing a new complaint mechanism to enforce international standards of conditions and treatment of immigration detainees.