No Beds, No Light, No Rights: Mapping the Hidden Detention of Migrants in Greece’s Police Stations 

Post by Andriani Fili. Andriani is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, and co-director of Border Criminologies.

When we launched the Detention Landscapes platform last year, we set out to map the invisible: the carceral spaces where migrants in Greece are held that were never meant for detention — border posts, airport holding cells, and police stations. 

Our new report, No Beds, No Light, No Rights focuses on the continued — and illegal — use of police stations for this form of detention. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with individuals detained between 2020 and 2025, the report provides a stark and deeply troubling portrait of conditions inside these facilities. Despite legal provisions that permit police detention only in exceptional cases for short periods of time, interviewees were held for an average of 29 days, with some spending up to four months in conditions that the European Human Rights Court and monitoring bodies have described as inhuman and degrading. 

What we document are not isolated failures, but systemic and chronic practices of confinement and neglect, hidden in plain sight. 

“That place was like a prison. It was very dark and unhygienic [...] I have seen a lot of difficult situations of people thinking about committing suicide.”  

Man detained in Poroia Police Department, Serres prefecture, for two weeks in 2022 (960623)  

“One day felt like one week, because you have nothing to play with or lose time with. One hour feels like three hours”  

Man detained in Idomeni Police Department for 26 days in 2023 (217590)  

The report is grounded in a methodology that centres lived experience. Many of the interviews were conducted by field reporters from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, with the support of interpreters and cultural mediators. The result is a collection of testimonies that bring to life the everyday violence of detention: hunger, cold, untreated illness, beatings, and the constant erosion of dignity.  

This work builds on a growing body of scholarship in border criminology, which has emphasised how immigration control is increasingly enacted through carceral logics and infrastructures — often outside public view. Through this research, we identified 25 police departments used for detention across Greece, from Thessaloniki to Evros, Larissa to Athens.  

This research reveals not only individual suffering, but a broader carceral geography that underpins Greek migration policy. The testimonies available on the report and the platform resist the abstraction that so often accompanies policy debates. They remind us that detention is not just a legal measure, but a lived and embodied experience of harm. 

Although the Greek government has repeatedly promised to phase out the use of police stations for immigration detention, since at least 2009, these promises remain unfulfilled. Oversight is minimal, and many facilities fall outside the regular inspections conducted by the CPT or the Greek Ombudsman. As a result, crucial data on the number and conditions of detainees remains unavailable or unreliable.  

“He used the baton only. I put my hand so he wouldn’t hit my head. So, then he was hitting my hand [...] I didn’t do anything and he was hitting me”  

Man detained in the Promachonas Border Guard Department close to the Bulgarian border for 21 days in 2025 (732877) 

At its core, this report is a call for accountability. We urge independent monitoring bodies to prioritise police facilities in their inspections. We call on the Greek state to comply with both domestic and international law. And we ask all those working in the field, researchers, lawyers, advocates, to refuse the normalisation of these hidden spaces of violence. 

The violence of immigration enforcement occurs not only at the borders. It is embedded in the everyday architecture of the state, in the police cell with no light, the mattress infested with bugs, the refusal to give a blanket, a phone call, or a name. 

Until these spaces are documented, accounted for, and challenged, the map of immigration detention in Greece remains incomplete. 

You can read the full report here. 

Explore site profiles and testimonies on the Detention Landscapes database.