6 L. KARAMANIDOU The analysis draws on a corpus of 136 publically available documents covering a period of twenty years, from 1994 to 2014. The corpus includes three genres of documents: . . Downloaded by [82.28.181.28] at 02:36 18 February 2016 . official responses to reports by the European Council against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Other Degrading treatment (hereafter CPT) and Commissioner for Human Rights, and government submissions to the UN Human Rights Periodic review; press releases by the Ministry for Public Order and Citizen Protection and parliamentary proceedings including debates, oral and written government responses to parliamentary scrutiny questions.1 These genres reflect discourses articulated by Greek governments2 and institutions in addressing both international and domestic audiences and were identified as appropriate on the basis of previous research on migration in Greece. The main criterion for inclusion was relevance – containing statements by political actors on violence against migrants. Priority was given to statements made by government officials and Members of Parliament (MP); however, some parliamentary debates were included despite the absence of responses to statements by opposition MPs, since this occurrence was significant in itself. All official responses were sourced from the relevant organizations’ websites. Parliamentary proceedings were located through combinations of the keywords ‘racism’ ‘racist’ ‘violence’ ‘mistreatment’ ‘migrants’ and ‘police’ in order to facilitate the location of texts where violence might not be referred to as racist. Identified texts were then searched internally using the Control + F function to confirm eligibility for inclusion. Some MPOCP press material was located in the same manner but since the website’s search engine did not provide results from archived documents, I read through lists of press releases, excluding those that appeared unlikely to contain relevant content.3 While there is a likelihood that relevant material was overlooked, the processes followed produced a corpus is representative and sufficient for the research aims of this project, although text availability was limited in the earlier part of the examined period – the issue appeared to be less prominent at that time. A summary of the documents used is provided in Table 1. Supplementary texts including discursive constructions related to racism were drawn from previous research on the political discourse of migration and asylum. The analysis focused on the main themes or topoi in representations of anti-migrant violence and the argumentation strategies (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012; Reisigl and Wodak 2009) speakers employ in legitimating policies and practices. I adopted a deductive/inductive approach to developing analytical categories – some (‘isolated events’ and ‘denial of racism’) emerged from the literature and others (e.g. ‘no evidence’/‘commitment to combatting