Court: Escape from Greek lockup was justified

The court in the northwestern city of Igoumenitsa said the 15 adults — from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Morocco — had been held for up to six weeks in "wretched and highly dangerous" conditions.

The decision to acquit the migrants of escaping police detention is a strong indictment of Greece's treatment of detained illegal immigrants, which has been repeatedly criticized by international human rights groups.

A spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency in Athens said it was a very significant first for a Greek court to acknowledge that people held in such conditions had no option but to try to escape.

The country, grappling with revived anti-immigrant sentiment amid the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II, is the main entry point to the EU for thousands of undocumented migrants from Asia and Africa and has started a drive to round up and expel them.

More than 30 inmates were crammed into an 18-square-yard (15-square-meter) cell with no running water or bedding and just one chemical toilet, according to the ruling, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press on Monday. It said the Igoumenitsa lockup was never cleaned and the detainees were coping with lice, skin disease and typhoid.

The men had been held in the port city pending deportation for allegedly illegally entering the country, and they escaped on Oct. 1 by pushing past police guards who had entered the cell to clear garbage.

Judge Athanassios Terzoudis argued in his October ruling that both the duration and the conditions of their detention were in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

"Therefore, the court judges that (the detainees) escaped to avoid a severe and otherwise inevitable threat which — through no fault of their own — endangered their health, and specifically to avoid infectious diseases given their particularly limited access to medical attention care, medicine and hospital treatment," the ruling said.