The Continuum of Detention in Greece
Posted
Time to read
Post by Andriani Fili, Leverhulme International Network Facilitator, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.
For a number of years, detention was Greece’s main policy in the management of irregular arrivals. It was predicated upon two simple ideas: The first one was deterrence. ‘We have to make their lives miserable, otherwise they will be under the impression that coming to Greece they will be free to do what they want’, the Head of Hellenic Police advised his officers. From this view, faced with the prospect of prolonged stay inside a Greek detention centre under deplorable conditions irregular migrants will be discouraged to make the perilous journey to Greece. The current refugee crisis in the Aegean, however, proves that any focus on deterrence, either in the form of fencing and gatekeeping or by making detention facilities unlivable, is willfully ignorant of the kinds of factors propelling people to move in the first place and, thus, completely ineffective.

Arguably, then, the Greek detention policy has been based on flimsy foundations because the Greek state has managed neither to curb arrivals nor remove the undesirable population. Instead, detention has been employed in the most capricious and arbitrary manner. The paradox of the Greek detention policy wasn’t lost on detainees. ‘We are buried alive here. This is like a mass grave … but we are not animals, we are humans and we have human rights, no?’ male detainees at the Athens International airport detention facility pronounced firmly. In this framework, forms of resistance flourished. In some instances it was spontaneous, triggered by an incident of violence and in others it was organized in advance. Detainees often engaged in hunger strikes. Others issued statements, with the support of human rights organizations against detention practices. In other places, detainees initiated a mutiny by setting mattresses on fire (for more on this see here). The voices that demanded a change in the detention system grew stronger every day.

The Greek government’s plan was further accompanied by the announcement of a range of measures that presented an important step towards reducing the use of immigration detention in Greece. The announcement included the revocation of the Ministerial Decision allowing for detention beyond 18 months and the immediate release of persons concerned. Furthermore, action would be taken in order to put in place open reception centres instead of detention facilities. The announcement also noted that alternatives to detention would be implemented for the first time, the maximum period of detention would be limited to six months, and persons belonging to vulnerable groups as well as asylum seekers would be immediately released. A year later, in March 2016, Amygdaleza was once again at its full capacity and Greece was fast becoming a massive containing space of the thousands of refugees trapped in its islands and mainland. How can this turnaround be explained?
In June 2015, at the same time as the government was negotiating a new bail out deal with Europe, it recognized that the boats wouldn’t stop coming. Indeed, over the summer of 2015, the numbers escalated, reaching their peak in October with 218,394 new arrivals. However, the Greek government didn’t have the resources to deal with the flow. For example, during the summer there were only four representatives of the First Reception Service to register newcomers on Lesvos, the island which received around 3,000 people per day. What is more, the Greek government did not have the political will to act swiftly to build a sustainable plan for the reception and registration of new arrivals and quickly resorted to blaming the EU for not pouring in more funds. Members of the government threatened to unleash a wave ‘of millions of economic migrants’ on Europe unless the EU helped Greece financially. Unofficially, though, this wasn’t far from the truth. Until recently, most of the new arrivals were neither registered nor fingerprinted due to severe staff shortages. Near the end of the summer, the police, that were responsible for managing the closed reception centres on the islands, opened the gates due to its incapability to provide food to all the people.

As a result, the European Commission developed the idea of the ‘hotspot approach.’ The aim was to help slow the flow of migrants heading to the north and mitigate security risks by swiftly identifying, registering, and fingerprinting all arrivals in Italy and Greece. European leaders have said that ‘hot spots’ are key to securing the EU’s external borders. Furthermore, in late January the EU gave Greece a three-month ultimatum to stop migrants crossing from Turkey, or else the country would be banned from the borderless Schengen area. Austria and several Balkan countries were determined to stop migrants passing through by building rows of fences and Fyrom (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has now sealed its southern border with Greece. With the end of the wave-through approach, thousands of migrants were stranded in Greece. Where would they be all accommodated? Firstly, amid EU pressure to deal with the situation, the five long-delayed ‘hotspot’ centers opened on the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Leros, Samos, and Kos in February 2016 in order to cope with a relentless flow of people landing from Turkey. Secondly, the Greek government promised to speed up the creation of new reception centres in order to boost its reception capacity to 30,000.
At the moment, there are more than 30 emergency reception sites and five hotspots, as well as a number of informal sites, spread all over Greece, operating with capacity for 41,600 people and an actual population of more than 53,500. The government also plans to open five more reception facilities in old industrial sites in Northern Greece. In addition to these new facilities, Greece continues to use a number of pre-removal detention centres, older dedicated detention facilities, and numerous border guard and police stations. However, as a report by the Asylum Information Database argues, there is little official clarity as to what can be presented as detention facilities or reception structures. The available evidence shows, however, that confinement and detention are once again employed as an accommodation strategy for the rising number of refugees and migrants.
For example, pre-removal detention centres like Amygdaleza, the closure of which was celebrated in the presence of the media at the beginning of the government’s term of office, have now been re-opened to house the overwhelming numbers. Under the EU-Turkey deal, which came into force on 20 March 2016, migrants arriving on the Greek islands are immediately detained in order to be individually assessed by the Greek authorities. Anyone who doesn’t apply for asylum will be sent back to Turkey, as will anyone whose claim is rejected. Implementation of the deal has presented Greece with a challenge: to separate between those already trapped in Greece and new arrivals, as the fate of the former group is not addressed by the deal. This involved emptying Greek islands of all those who crossed over from Turkey prior to the deal and transforming the much vaunted open hotspots into massive police-run detention centres to host newcomers. The amended legal framework of first reception procedures (3907/2011) further clarifies that migrants are subject to restriction of freedom of movement within the premises of these centres. The line between open accommodation and confinement often becomes difficult to draw in practice, as is the case of the new reception centres, which operate out of public sight and monitoring bodies.

Historically, no Greek government has ever shown the political will to break with the detention continuum. The left-wing government bears no exception to this. In the absence of a well-studied, concerted response, and given the overwhelming numbers of migrants and refugees, the Greek state was very quick to succumb to the EU’s models of encampment and abandon its humanitarian and leftist ideals that were its flagship almost a year ago. What lies ahead for the migrants and refugees who arrive on Greece’s shores remains to be seen; yet, human rights organisations fret over a looming bleak future for Greece’s detainees.
Note: The pictures are all taken by the author and are part of a poster-project on the streets of Athens. The short texts are excerpts from interviews with asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees in Greece that artist Tim Etchells conducted.
Any comments about this post? Get in touch with us! Send us an email, or post a comment here or on Facebook. You can also tweet us.
__________
How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):
Fili, A. (2016) The Continuum of Detention in Greece. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/05/continuum (Accessed [date]).
Share
YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN
With the support of







