Prague, Sept 16 (CTK) – The conditions in Czech facilities for refugees are bad, especially in the detention centres, representatives of the nongovernmental organisations told journalists yesterday.
They called on the interior, education, justice, and labour and social affairs ministries to join the experts from the nongovernmental sphere and issue a joint instruction that will set safe and human conditions for all stages of the contact with the migrants who may be in the Czech Republic.
The Czech Republic is unable to provide the refugees with the adequate protection, the NGOs said.
Martin Rozumek, head of the Organization for Aid to Refugees, said the placing of refugees in detention facilities is against international law. Czech courts repeatedly decided that refugees cannot be detained because of the fear that they might escape, he added.
But the Interior Ministry insists on detaining the refugees. It argues that the refugees entered the Czech territory illegally.
“The people simply have to endure a partial lack of freedom, because they violated law, and we treat them accordingly. [The facilities] are warm and dry places, the people have enough food,” Interior Minister Milan Chovanec told Czech Television (CT).
He said the ministry needs to know the people’s identity, and that this is a standard procedure.
“The police assist only where problems arise. It is not true that they assist in the distribution of food automatically,” Chovanec added.
Rozumek said the detention is acceptable only for a short time and only in cases of foreigners who will be expelled, according to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
“In 95 percent of cases the people are not expelled to Hungary and so the people are detained uselessly and unlawfully,” he said.
Justice Minister Robert Pelikan told CTK that he cannot understand why the regime in detention facilities was so strict for refugees.
He said it must be checked whether this regime was in line of the country’s international pledges, namely the European convention on human rights that sets the minimum standards for dealing with people deprived of their freedom.
Pelikan said his ministry is the body protecting these standards in the Czech Republic.
He said he can see no reason why mobile phones are taken away from the detained refugees. A lack of interpreters is another problem, he added.
Anna Hofschneiderova, lawyer for the Human Rights League, said the refugees are often stripped of their liberty legally as the state limits their movement, confiscates their money and places them in the detention facilities with inhumane and humiliating conditions.
There are cases of refugee families being divided and its members placed in different facilities, Hofschneiderova said.
“Any placing of the child migrants and families with children in the detention facilities grossly violates the children’s best interest and their right to favourable development. It may eventually lead to inhumane or humiliating treatment,” she added.
The NGOs have recorded a number of cases when the refugees complained that after their detention, the police handcuffed them for too long.
In the published video recordings, the refugees also complained about being moved from one detention facility to another, and about the conditions in the facilities and the confiscation of their cell phones.
Some of them claimed that since they had been deprived of most of the confiscated money, they could not pay any travel expenses after their release from the facilities.
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