Trubeta: ‘Rights’ in the grey area: undocumented border crossers on Lesvos 57 the strategy pursued by refugees and undocumented immigrants shows how limited their scope is for asserting any rights, given the intensified augmentation of border surveillance worldwide. Keywords: activism, border crossers, human rights, immigration detention, Lesvos, PIKPA, post-bureaucracy, refugees Passages from a border diary It is a sunny Saturday noon in April in the port of Mytilene, the capital of the Aegean island of Lesvos.1 A ferryboat has just arrived from Turkey and a group of tourists are walking across the dock heading to the nearby hotel. They pass by a group of people who lie on improvised beds in sheds inside the port area. These are people who have clandestinely arrived on Lesvos through Turkey; women and children are among them. They look exhausted and some of them are trying to relax and protect themselves from the intense sun by lying underneath a minibus. The locals call them collectively ‘humans’ (in Greek: anthropoi), implying an embarrassed perplexity in the face of individuals in need. The ‘humans’ are later divided into ‘the imprisoned and/or those who are waiting to be imprisoned’, ‘new and/or old arrivals’, ‘with papers and/or without papers’, ‘Syrians or Afghanis, and others’. Formally, they remain under the surveillance of the coastguard; however, their administrative status is unclear since the coastguard is not legally authorised to keep individuals under arrest for longer than three days. After that the police are in charge. But police inaction has blocked any further processing and keeps them confined to the island with no prospect of altering their situation. The border crossers persistently ask for the police. ‘Just let me give my fingerprints and finally leave!’, says one woman. The coastguard staff bring the bad news: ‘Unfortunately, it’s not today either.’ They, too, feel the effect of the police’s inaction, not least because they have to bear the brunt of the work, and have to do overtime. Apart from the coastguard, also assembled in the port are the staff of FRONTEX, ordinary citizens, members of NGOs, activists, volunteers and priests. All mix freely and operate as though they were working to the same ends. Every day, local people and priests bring homemade meals. Over time, all those involved become unhappy about the police since, as the asylum seekers are technically under arrest, their care is the police’s responsibility, as are ‘the papers’ that will allow them to leave the island, first for the harbour of Piraeus on the mainland and then for the next destination country. The ‘paper’ is nothing other than an administrative expulsion order that requires them to leave the country within thirty days. However, it is interpreted as a ‘travel document’ that allows them to leave the island and to stay legally in the country for thirty days; as such, it is claimed as a ‘right’ for which the border crossers have decided to fight. Indeed, Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016