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The United Nations refugee authority criticized the Czech Republic for detaining migrants on their way to other European countries, saying international law reserves the practice as “a measure of last resort.”

Czech authorities are holding migrants for 40 -- and in some cases 90 -- days, depriving them of their mobile phones and other belongings, strip searching them, and forcing them to pay for their detention, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in an e-mailed statement on Thursday. Interior Minister Milan Chovanec said the country wasn’t breaking any rules.

UN Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said the Czech “violations of the human rights of migrants are neither isolated nor coincidental, but systematic,” according to the report. “They appear to be an integral part of a policy by the Czech government designed to deter migrants and refugees from entering the country or staying there.”

Eastern European countries including the Czech Republic have opposed a German-led proposal for mandatory quotas to redistribute as many as a million or more Middle Eastern and African migrants expected to arrive in Europe this year to escape war and poverty at home. Unlike other countries facing greater numbers of migrants that have sealed off their borders, such as Hungary, or allowed relatively unrestricted passage for tens of thousands of migrants, the Czechs are holding undocumented entrants in detention centers.

Strip-Searches

“We are improving conditions for refugees and we don’t think we are violating any directives or rules,” Chovanec told CTK news service, adding that he hadn’t seen the details of the UNHCR report.

The country of 10.5 million isn’t on the main route of migrants stretching from Turkey to Greece, through the Balkans and then further north to Germany, and has not seen the tens of thousands of refugees entering into neighboring states. About 400 refugees were being held in a former military site at Bela-Jezova, a town 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Prague earlier this month, according to a report published by Czech Ombudswoman Anna Sabatova on Oct. 15.

‘Particularly Reprehensible’

According to Sabatova’s report, the situation at detention centers is “worse than imprisonment.” Migrants were degraded in front of their children, who were also traumatized by the presence of armed guards. Most detainees aren’t aware that legal assistance is available, although those able to contest their detention in court have been released. Strip-searches to confiscate money to pay for detentions is “without clear legal grounds” and leave many of the migrants “destitute upon their release,” according to the UNHCR statement.

“The fact that people are being forced to pay for their own detention is particularly reprehensible,” Zeid said. The UNHCR also expressed alarm at “an increasingly xenophobic public discourse” by Czechs in positions of authority.

Last week, President Milos Zeman said migrants will solely follow Sharia law and “adulterous women will be stoned, thieves will have their hands chopped off,” according to news website Novinky.cz. His predecessor, Vaclav Klaus, is pushing for a referendum on refugees, telling Lidove Noviny earlier this month that “we shouldn’t let them come here and we have to quickly send them back.”

Zeman’s spokesman, Jiri Ovcacek, said the UNHCR report is trying to undermine the freedom of speech in the Czech Republic and vilify the president.

“This isn’t the first verbal attack on the president,” CTK quoted Ovcacek as saying. “It’s completely clear that a campaign against the Czech Republic is intensifying because of the country’s stance toward the migration crisis.”

(Updates with president's spokesman in last two paragraphs.)