Turin's CIE - International University College of Turin

4. HYGIENE AND CLEANLINESS
Hygiene is one of the most important day-to-day problems inside the CIE. In particular, many
male detainees were concerned about the absence of personal shaving instruments. The sharing
of shavers presents a health concern given the possibility of cutting oneself during shaving and
the fact that several diseases (such as Hepatitis B, Saph bacteria, HIV AIDS) can spread through
contact with blood:
“We have two shavers to do our beards amongst a hundred of people, so it is not hygienic.
Moreover sometimes you get the shaver when it has almost run out of battery. So you shave
only a half of your beard and you stay like this for the following week” (Interview 20);
“We cannot buy blades. They are not allowed. We all have long beards and long hair. They
give us one electronic shaver for the whole area – about twenty people. We risk getting
skin disease, infections and also serious things” (Interview 21);
“In order to have a shave, once detainees could not do it on their own - they needed to take
it in turns to get shaved. And this was one of the greatest problems because there were
people who had to wait up to one month to be shaved and they were suffering about being
untidy. There were people who had a barbershop in Tunisia, they said they could have
shaved everybody and they were frustrated about waiting for someone else to come and
shave them. But lately I saw in the refectory someone who was shaving with an electric
shaver, so maybe now the situation has changed, but I am not sure about this”
(Interview 2).
It is possible that the shavers are being cleaned between either individual users or rooms, and
we did not have the opportunity to ask the CIE staff about this issue. However, based on the
detainee interviews there was strong evidence that shavers were passing between at least two
or more detainees without being sanitised. As noted in the above quotations, detainees were
uninformed about the process and they brought the issue up with us, expressing concern for
their health.
In CIE more generally, the level of cleanliness seems to depend on the area: “some of them are
tidy and clean, some of them are completely dirty and are left in a mess. It depends on the
detainees themselves” (Interview 2). However, the overall impression is that CIE is not very clean
and this adds pressure to cohabiting detainees who must live with five or six strangers:
“The CIE is not clean. It is really bad and this is the lack of respect not only for lawyers and
judges but for the people who are inside. They [detainees] are not so important. This is the
message. I don’t believe this is a lack of resources. The first thing would be to clean up the
place. And also the other places, Red Cross places. […] [T]here are places on the left where
hearings take place and where you can meet your client and on the right, instead, there are
Red Cross offices - the offices where the doctor, the social workers and the physiologists
work. Obviously the room where you meet these people is clean and the pavement is clean.
So, why is it that on the right it is clea, and on the left it is not clean? This is the lack of
respect. This is a message” (Interview 7);
“The environment is not clean, we can already see this from the interview room and in the
hallways, where on the walls there are enormous combat boot footprints. These are
certainly not the footprints of detainees who have slippers, but of the military who lean
their foot on the wall” (Interview 4).
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