On 18 April 2020, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that the conditions on Chios, Kos and Samos constituted inhuman or degrading treatment for three people and therefore violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Equal Rights Beyond Borders represented two of the applicants on Chios and Kos.
A man of advanced age lived in a tent for months, unable to wash or meet the most basic needs on his own – and yet was left alone and ignored by Greece. A woman who survived severe sexual violence was imprisoned for several months – together with men. She did not even know why she was being held, there was a lack of information, which is why the Court also found a violation of the right to information in detention under Article 5 paragraph 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. When she was finally released, there were no services to help her and she ended up homeless – living in a self-built cardboard hut that fell over easily in the wind and was destroyed by the rain.
“The Court's judgements are brief, because they state the obvious: that people must be treated as human beings and must not be kept in camps and left to their own fate. How these camps on the EU's external border can serve as a blueprint for a successful reform of the Common European Asylum System is not only baffling, but also revealing. The European Union has become indifferent to human rights. This urgently needs to change”
The decisions are a reminder. What was experienced by those individuals cannot be undone, the financial compensation and the Court's finding that human rights have been violated may be a source of satisfaction, but above all they clearly demonstrate to the European Union and Greece that human rights are inalienable, that they must be protected and must always be the guiding principle of state action. And yet the reform of the Common European Asylum System wants more camps, more border procedures, more detention. This will lead straight to the conditions that the European Court of Human Rights has now labelled as degrading or inhumane.