00:00Two months after tens of thousands of migrants flooded into Spain's African enclave of Ceuta,
00:06three European lawmakers have described the humanitarian situation as grim and getting
00:10worse daily.
00:11The members of the European Parliament were speaking at a joint press conference in Brussels
00:15after completing a fact-finding mission to the territory.
00:19While most of the estimated 72,000 people were returned to neighboring Morocco within
00:24several days, a few thousand are believed to have remained in the city.
00:32Ceuta cannot become a laboratory for the reduction of rights, nor can it become an open-air refugee
00:38camp, which is what it will lead to if people are still trapped in this territory, because
00:43the solution is not to keep thousands of people in makeshift emergency camps or emergency camps
00:48that are taking place in a territory.
00:54The sudden influx of the migrants into Ceuta, which has a population of about 84,000 people,
01:00put a huge strain on resources and angered many residents.
01:08In Ceuta, there's torture, inhumane treatment by military forces.
01:13These are not isolated events.
01:15There's a pattern.
01:16There are patrols that do night sweeps and that beat up people.
01:21They steal from migrants, force them to shave their hair, to kneel down to kiss a Christian
01:27cross or the Spanish flag.
01:30We're talking about something very serious, the state going out on a hunt when they should
01:36be protecting people.
01:38Instead, they're violating their rights.
01:42The rights group Amnesty International has also accused Spain's armed forces of torture and
01:47other cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of the stranded migrants.
01:52The Spanish government on Wednesday ordered the military to conduct an internal probe to identify
01:57any individuals potentially responsible for the alleged acts.
