isolated place too far away for many poor families to regularly visit their children, the boys had to relieve themselves in bottles and plastic bags, which they threw out of the window, resulting in a repulsive smell around the building. This smell accompanied us on many fact-finding missions. In many poor countries, the task of providing detainees with sufficient food and water had been delegated in fact to the families of detainees. Time and again I saw families with plastic bottles of water and plastic bags with food entering prisons in order to satisfy the most basic needs of their children and loved ones. Since toilets were often missing, as I witnessed for instance in all police lock-ups in Equatorial Guinea, the same plastic bottles were used for urinating and the plastic bags for defecating. In many instances, it was the smell itself that often guided us to where people had been detained. Even at the International Airport of Athens (Greece), we encountered this specific smell, as the holding cells for migrants were so overcrowded that the toilets had ceased functioning. Children in an overcrowded immigration detention centre in Greece, 2010 In the north of Greece, along the Evros River, which marks the border to Turkey, I visited various migration detention centres the conditions of which were so dreadful that we assessed them in their entirety as inhuman and degrading. A high proportion of migrants who were crammed together in these overcrowded detention places were children: unaccompanied minors as well as families with small children. Even the police guards who were supposed to keep order declined to enter these cells, and the cleaning staff had given up all efforts to clean the flooded toilets! I will never forget a Somalian woman with two little children who broke down when she realised that the excrements of the broken toilets had flooded the floor where she had prepared a blanket for her babies to sleep. She did not wish to believe that she had entered the European Union. 7