lacked information on the authorities responsible for the implementation of certain actions
and for monitoring the implementation of those actions (European Commission, 2016c).
While not all facilities used to confine people in the aftermath of 2015 were detention
centres per se, the line between open accommodation and confinement often became
difficult to draw in practice. The spatial logic of refugee camps was that they were as
physically remote as possible. This fact, when combined with severely restricted access to
the asylum process in these places, rendered most people inside them invisible and
immobilised in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions. People were not only stuck inside
camps; under the EU-Turkey deal and in view of walls being literally and metaphorically
built across Europe they were also physically prevented from leaving Greece.76
As a 2016 report by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles argued, there is little
official clarity as to what can be presented as detention facilities or reception structures in
Greece (Mouzourakis and Taylor, 2016). It is explained that the highly misleading
representation of the country’s reception capacity, including detention places, can be
attributed to the effort to reach the EU target of 30,000 reception places and satisfy other
member states. At the same time, the number of detainees was wrongly presented as
smaller than the actual one, failing to include the number of people detained in hotspots.
This is further reflected in another report by Access Info and the Global Detention Project
(2015), which aimed to obtain a true picture of the number of migrants and asylum seekers
being held in detention around the world. Greece failed to provide complete information
on the names and locations of detention centres and offered invalid answers to questions
about the number of (asylum seeker) detainees and the number of minors in detention.
Greek authorities, in their beloved tactic, did not include the many police stations, where
migrants were known to be detained, thus, invisibilising a great number of detainees and
directed the researchers to the Greek police’s website that contains limited information in
order to avoid directly responding to questions. In effect, Greece’s detained migrants were
going uncounted and hence unaccounted for.
In stark opposition to this framing, people on the move across Greece found ways to circumvent
containment practices and, albeit in smaller numbers, managed to leave Greece. However, this means that
they increasingly depended on smuggling networks and attempted risky journeys (See further Stierl, 2019).
76
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