Impact and transparency Due to staff and time constraints, individual reports following inspections are not published or shared with any relevant stakeholders, limiting their effectiveness in shedding light on harmful detention practices. In most cases, they are not even written due to the lack of time available to NPM staff, who are undoubtedly overworked. Therefore, their dissemination strategy is focused on publishing annual special reports, summarising the main findings of all inspections.97 The government’s likelihood of accepting recommendations is mainly at the hands of the police, the NPM told us. According to them, although some sympathetic detention managers try to implement recommendations where possible, a great deal of the NPM’s findings are inadequately accepted or implemented. A meeting with the senior director based at Petrou Ralli, Mr Louziotis, in September 2018 gave little assurance that the concerns the NPM had raised would be acted on. On the contrary, he did not consider the meeting as part of a monitoring visit but merely as a way for the NPM to receive his complaints and help him attract some more funding. In fact, according to the NPM, most directors do not even recognize the NPM as an entity as most know them as ‘the Ombudsman’. Mr Louziotis went on saying that the Ombudsman should think about the position of police staff in detention centres and what they have to deal with. What is more, he said as he laid back on his chair, he does not agree with some of what is written [about the Petrou Ralli pre-removal centre] in reports; a statement that was left unchallenged by the NPM. Whereas maintaining good working relationships with the authorities is considered to be a good practice, having casual conversations with the directors of the centres over coffee undermines their ability to raise their findings and press for solutions (Birk et al., 2015). As one member of the Greek NPM blatantly put it ‘We can’t be very displeasing. We have a gentlemen’s agreement with the police’ (Fieldnotes, Athens, 2018). Through this informal agreement between honourable men (Campbell, 1964), the NPM and the Hellenic police, have made their association a relationship relying on the fulfillment of spoken or unspoken obligations. Drawing on studies of Mediterranean anthropology and modern Greece, this aspect of fulfilling expectations is particularly tied to the Greek taxonomy of values and The strained resources and staff have further affected the publication of annual reports. The reports for both the years 2016 and 2017 were both published at the end of 2018 (The Greek Ombudsman, 2018a; 2018b). 97 147