Dear colleagues,
I am a US lawyer of Afghan descent currently volunteering in Greece with the refugee population there. Below, please find my account of what happened yesterday to a 14 year old boy in Athens. Could I please ask that this be forwarded to the listserve in an effort to understand how we can best move forward to bring justice to this boy and countless others who have been arrested by the police and held without charge and whose stories I do not yet know and also how we can argue that Greece is not a safe country for him to seek asylum in.
Thank you,
Shala Gafary
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A 14 year old Afghan boy had gotten into a fight at Piraeus port. He was beaten by a group of refugees and went to receive treatment at the Red Cross tent there. He had been beaten with a cane and his face was severely bruised. That's when the Athens police came.
They arrested him and only him. They handcuffed him, seated him in the police car, and brought him the police station. For 24 hours, they choked him, kicked him, punched him, slapped him, and sexually abused him. They didn't feed him, didn't give him any water, didn't let him go to the bathroom, and didn't let him go to sleep. For much of the day he sat only in his underwear, handcuffed to a metal rail. They laughed and ate and had their female officers watch as they strip searched him repeatedly. When his blood-stained tears covered the floor, they threw napkins at him and made him clean up the mess. Again, he is just 14 years old. He is an orphan.
To witness the aftermath of this up close is something that there are no words for. I went to the police station, and because I could not understand what the police were saying, I was trying to read their body language, with full knowledge that the monsters were among them. I sat with this boy and his friends at the hospital and tried to help him remember the details of what happened to him, as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He was shaking and didn't want us to leave the hospital for fear of the police coming back for him. They still have all his documents. He was never charged with a crime.
These refugees have accepted that they are robbed by local gangs, exploited by smugglers, attacked by other refugees, and, of course, that they have risked their lives to flee war, unjust governments, and terrorist groups. But this they cannot accept.
This is Europe?, they ask.
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