"Everyday some people are trying to suicide"

A summarised version of this report is available on Detention Landscapes

The respondent is a Bangladeshi national, who was sharing his personal experience as well as talking in the name of at least 15 other people who had been detained in the Special Detention Facility of Serres, in Sintiki.

The respondent reported arriving in Greece, from Libya in mid-August 2025, along with 38 other third country nationals, and was subjected to the unlawful suspension of asylum applications, implemented by the Greek government between July-October 2025 for all third country nationals arriving from North Africa. He was automatically detained on arrival to Greece, without access to the asylum procedure, and remained in detention after the ban was lifted.

The respondent described his transfer to Sintiki from the south of the Greek mainland. He explained that the journey lasted around 13-14 hours in total and started with 3 hours in a “police van”. He further described: “Then they threw us in a bus, but the bus was not good actually. It was like a mini-jail.” He reported that the bus contained several cells, each detaining 4 people. The group was reportedly not provided with any water during the first 12 hours of the journey. As the respondent recalled: “We told them ‘we need water, we need water’ but they did not listen to us. They gave us a bottle of water last moment, after 12 hours.” While the respondent mentioned the presence of ventilation in the bus, he added that it was not sufficient to cover the needs of the group.

Upon arrival in Sintiki, the group was reportedly not provided with any information or clarification of their fate: “[N]obody told us what was happening here.” The respondent described the steps he had to go through upon arrival in the facility: “They took our fingerprints on a paper, and then they took our photos. Then nine days later, they took our biometrics. That’s it.” He added that detainees in Sintiki had not been provided with any documents for more than a month after their transfer, this delay varying from 50 days to 70 days depending on the person. The first document they were distributed was reportedly a 50-day detention decision.

 

The respondent provided details on the asylum procedures within the detention facility in Sintiki: “Everyone did their best, everyone had problems, they explained everything in the interview. The results came after one month. Maybe at this time there were 750 people in the camp - everyone got rejected. It was fast rejections.” Some detainees reportedly protested as a result. The respondent further explained that some detainees in Sintiki received a first instance rejection without participating in any interview.

 

Regarding the appeal process, the respondent described his interview with the lawyer: “One person told us: ‘He is the lawyer, tell him everything.’ At the moment, the Bangladeshi translator said: ‘Are you repeating the same thing?’ I said: ‘Yes, I have nothing new to tell.’ Then he said: ‘Ok the interview is finished.’ In 5 minutes it was finished.” The respondent added that both his asylum interview and interview with the lawyer happened online, via a laptop, and that the interpreter, lawyer and caseworker were remote. 

 

The respondent described discrepancies and lack of clarity in practices upon reception of final rejections within the facility: “After the second rejection, they told us: ‘We are giving you the 30-day paper and everyone will be free.’ We were happy about this. At that time, about 30 Egyptians got free with a 7-day paper. I don’t know what it is, they said it was a 7-day paper. They were also rejected like us, how could they be free?” After 30 days, the respondent and his co-detainees were reportedly not released. He explained that they were later distributed other documents providing for their detention for 6 months, which can be renewed. He added that they were not informed of their possible maximum period of detention: “They were giving us papers, they told us: ‘You need to stay here 6 more months.’ Some people got a paper saying that they need to stay here one more year. If the 6-month paper is finished, maybe they would give us another paper renewing detention one more time. [...] They did not tell us the maximum.”

 

The respondent emphasised several times the total lack of information provision from the authorities to detainees: “If we told anything about our situation to the police, to the captain, they told us one thing only. Everyone we were in contact with said they don’t know, only politicians know.”; “There is nobody here, we just see the policemen. [When we ask questions], the policemen say: ‘tell the captain, we do not know anything about it’”. He later added: “They did not help about anything. In here, we cannot speak to anyone. [...] We told the policemen: ‘Why are we stuck here?’ They did not tell us. In our paper, it says we are trying to live illegally in Greece. It is not true, we are not trying to live here illegally. This is not true.”

 

The respondent explained that the detention facility in Sintiki is divided into four sections, and that detainees cannot communicate between sections. He further detailed that the division was not made by nationality, but said that he does not know how it was made. He added that only men had been detained in the facility. He then described the overcrowded conditions inside containers, explaining that between 15-20 people were confined in rooms appropriate for 4 to 6 people. Containers reportedly include air conditioners, with some of them being dysfunctional. The respondent explained that blankets were provided to detainees upon arrival, but that the amounts of beds and bedsheets were insufficient.

 

The respondent indicated that, in his section, 300 people were sharing 3 bathrooms. He added that detainees had to clean the bathrooms themselves with gloves and products provided by the camp administration. One person was reportedly visiting the facility in order to clean the toilets, but the interval between visits varied from 5 to 25 days.

 

The respondent described the absence of hot water during winter months: “In the first two months, we had access to hot water. Then the winter came, and maybe it got destroyed. We don’t have any hot water. In winter we showered with cold water.” He reported that detainees had been provided with 3 pieces of soap in total across several months of detention. He added that “[The soap] expired in 2022, 4 years ago”, giving people “allergy problems”: “some people had 2-month skin problems because of the soap.” He further explained that “the police and the camp management” were asking detainees to pay to be able to access other types of hygiene products: “The authorities [...] told us: ‘one brush and one paste together: 5 euros.’ [...] They did not take the products from outside, they took it from inside. We know it is free for us, if we told this, they told us ‘you need to give me money.’” The respondent then mentioned the visit of an external market to the detention facility, but explained that products were too expensive for detainees to afford: “The price was too high, we cannot afford this. [...] One small [packet of] noodles is 4 euros. Normally maybe it is 1 or 2 euros.”

The respondent then explained that detainees had not been provided with any clothes in Sintiki and had to wear the same clothes as those they came from Libya with: “In winter they did not give us any clothes, any pants. How do we do? If we don’t get money from our country, we can’t buy anything. [...] We have been using one [pair of] pants, one t-shirt for one year.”

 

The food distributed in the detention facility was described as low quality: “We eat the food and some people get food-poisoned.” The respondent further described difficult access to healthcare. Despite the presence of a doctor in the facility, he indicated that consultation was reportedly subject to the authorities’ approval: “If we tell the police ‘I want doctor’, they tell us ‘wait’. After 1 to 2 hours, they tell us ‘the doctor is not here’. [...] If my luck is good, I can see the doctor. If my luck is not good, I can’t.” The respondent explained that when detainees were able to consult medical staff, the latter would provide them with painkillers for most conditions: “If we have acidity problems, pain, fever, a cold, everything, they have one solution: one panadol.” He added that to receive a specific treatment, detainees were asked to pay: “[They were saying:] ‘If you give money, I give medicine’. Not every time; they were giving free medicine, it was panadol. But for other types of medicines they asked for money. If you have a major problem, a teeth problem, they remove the teeth, but for the new teeth they charge. For everything, for the medicine.” He added: “They told us if you have money, you have everything, if you don’t have money, you have nothing. [...] We have nothing.” The respondent also mentioned the possibility of going to the hospital in case of serious medical issues.

 

The respondent further described the extreme toll of detention on people, and the neglect of the facility’s authorities, explaining that “we have video footage” demonstrating that “everyday some people are trying to suicide”. The respondent explained further that “If you call the police telling what we do, they will not do anything, they did not tell us what is next, what we can do. We can take lawyers, but lawyers said ‘Kleidi camp is difficult, we can’t do this’.” He later added: “We did a hunger strike for 4 days. We just had one demand: for the captain to talk with us. But in 4 days, we saw nobody coming to talk with us. 20 to 25 people got sick in 4 days.”

 

The respondent finally expressed frustration and feelings of unfairness in the name of his co-detainees: “We need to live peacefully in your country. It is not our country, it is yours, but we need to live peacefully. They say Bangladesh is safe, yes, I agree, but not for everyone, not in every place. [...] We came here from Libya. [...] They stopped us in this detention centre, but some people, maybe 1000-2000 people came after us, but they did not get stuck in the camp, they got documents [...]. ”

He then expressed their wish to apply for asylum again with full respect of the procedures: “because some people did not do interviews. How is that possible?”

 

Finally, another person, detained along with the respondent, shared distressful words: “We have been tortured a lot by the mafia in Libya, there are many people who are talking about money, [they have] loans in Bangladesh. But here they do not consider it. We are human beings anyway. We are mentally tortured. We want to be free from here and want to work. Please help us. We are living in great difficulty. [...] We have families, we do not want to return to our country because we are in danger in our country. We have been tortured in Libya, then we are being tortured here. Please, we request the Greek government to be released from here very soon. We cannot handle suffering anymore. [...] Please help us, the Greek government, NGOs. [...] No one is a criminal, no one is a terrorist.” He added that detainees were not able to understand why or for how long they would be detained: “we don’t know, we don’t understand anything. We don’t know why we are tortured. The police is saying ‘go back, go back’, everyday [...].” Meanwhile, he explained that for many detainees in Sintiki, family members in Bangladesh struggled to afford food on a daily basis and therefore were dependent on financial support from them.