Trubeta: ‘Rights’ in the grey area: undocumented border crossers on Lesvos 67 immigration imprisonment worldwide testifies to the fact that the screening centre is not an institution in which protection is provided but a place in which – if nothing else – rights, including the right to asylum, are criminalised and human dignity is violated. So what then of the demand by refugees and immigrants on Lesvos to receive an ‘expulsion order’ and administrative detention as a ‘right’? The precarious ‘right’ to move in the ‘grey area’ For all the controversies among local activists on Lesvos about issues of political principle, the fact remains that the undocumented immigrants and refugees themselves tried to provoke their (administrative) internment by getting in the way of the public with their ‘illegal presence’; they then protested against the authorities’ inaction by going on a hunger strike. The influx of undocumented immigrants and refugees did not cease after the establishment of the screening centre, which coincided with the intensifying of Greek asylum legislation, despite frequent maritime accidents and deaths in the Aegean Sea. Passing through detention indicates a strategy of escape that can only be understood within the current framework of humanitarian protection and border surveillance, wherein the former is moulded by the weakening refugee condition and the latter by the intensified augmentation of border surveillance technologies and the criminalisation of undocumented border crossing. More concretely, given the weakening protection system for refugees, an expulsion order remains the only legal way (if not the only way at all) for undocumented immigrants and refugees arriving on Lesvos to leave the island and continue their journey. Applying for asylum in Greece would in all likelihood be futile in view of the extremely low percentage of applications approved and the high probability of refusal.28 Recent legislation has added a further inhibiting factor since asylum applicants are faced with up to eighteen months’ internment, even though they belong to those characterised as refugees by UNHCR. Indeed, the largest groups of undocumented arrivals on Lesvos are Afghanis and Syrians, followed by Somalis, and Palestinians,29 including children and unaccompanied minors. Even the latter may be detained in Greece, as in several other countries, despite the protection foreseen by human rights agencies.30 Moreover, due to the unfavourable conditions under which protection may be afforded, many unaccompanied minors relinquish the right to it.31 This was the case on Lesvos, where in spring 2013 some unaccompanied minors in the port area (the majority from Afghanistan and Somalia) claimed to be adults in order to get an administrative expulsion order and so leave the island. Being declared a minor would confine them to a dysfunctional system of humanitarian protection that was unable to provide them with a solution for the present, let alone for the future. Imprisonment that offers the prospect of release with an ‘administrative expulsion order’ is interpreted as a ‘privilege’ in view of the difficulties in acquiring Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on June 3, 2016