46  Ioanna Kotsioni j Detention of Migrants and Asylum-Seekers violations in immigration law sends out a message of intolerance, which can negatively influence host societies’ perceptions and attitudes towards foreigners. As Bosworth suggests: “[Immigration detention facilities] are justified by, and legitimate a politics of identity in which ‘foreigners’ are dangerous and unwelcome”.25 3. IMMIG RAT IO N D ETENT IO N IN GREECE, 200 9–201 4 The case of Greece between 2009 and 2014 shows how domestic politics, social tensions linked with the recession, and EU policies led to the widespread and prolonged use of immigration detention. In the period surrounding the 2012 national elections, which took place during a period of deep financial crisis and social tension immigration, detention capacity increased by 4,500 spaces. This three-fold increase coincided, from August 2012, with large-scale police operations conducting identity checks of foreign looking people in the streets of Athens and other big cities. The aim of these identity checks was to “crack down” on irregular migration. The political support for this was extensive at the time: in the words of the former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, “Greece today has become a centre for illegal immigrants. We must take back our cities, where the illegal trade in drugs, prostitution, and counterfeit goods is booming. There are many diseases and I am not only speaking about Athens, but elsewhere too.”26 Immigration detention has been applied systematically and indiscriminately and has affected migrants of many types. This includes rejected asylum-seekers; those without a valid stay permit (such as those who had been living for many years in Greece but were unable to renew their work permits as a consequence of the financial crisis); people who had not been able to apply for asylum before; people who only applied while in detention; as well as the newly arrived – which since 2012 have been mainly Afghan and Syrian nationals.27 Many international observers have condemned detention conditions, and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, following their visit to Greece in 2013, wrote: The non-application of alternatives to detention, lack of effective judicial review, and the excessive length of detention may render the detention of an individual arbitrary. In most detention facilities visited by the Working Group, conditions were well below international human rights standards, including in terms of severe overcrowding. In detention centres for asylum seekers, the Detention Watch Network, undated, available at: http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/resources (last visited 22 Feb. 2016). 25 M. Bosworth & E. Kaufman, “Inside Immigration Detention: Foreigners in a Carceral Age”, Stanford Law and Policy Review, 22(2), 2011, 429–454. 26 Human Rights Watch, Unwelcome Guests Greek Police Abuses of Migrants in Athens, New York, Human Rights Watch, Jun. 2013, available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2013/06/12/unwelcome-guests/ greek-police-abuses-migrants-athens (last visited 22 Feb. 2016). 27 Syrian nationals had also been routinely detained upon arrival until Apr. 2013 when the Government decided to hand them with six-month long “postponement of removal” decisions. A. Triandafyllidou, Migration in Greece Recent Developments in 2014, Report prepared for the OECD Network of International Migration Experts, Paris, 6–8 Oct. 2014, available at: http://www.eliamep.gr/wp-content/ uploads/2014/10/Migration-in-Greece-Recent-Developments-2014_2.pdf (last visited 22 Feb. 2016). The asylum system in Greece prior to 2013 lacked legal guarantees for the substantial examination of asylum applications and had an average recognition rate of 0.5 per cent.