In 1993, the CPT delegation referred to a large number of persons who alleged they had been ill-treated while in police custody, including with the use of wooden sticks, batons, baseball bats and electric shocks; objects which the delegation found in police offices (CPT, 1994). The following two reports reveal that beatings, concerning punches, kicks and slaps, by custodial staff, corroborated by medical evidence consistent with allegations of recent physical abuse, continued (CPT, 2001a and 2001b). Despite the sheer number of allegations of abuse and their consistency, the Greek authorities were adamant that there was no systematic torture or inhumane treatment of migrants (CPT, 1994). The Ministry of Public Order claimed that the legal framework for the protection of human rights was sufficient in protecting migrant detainees’ rights. Further, it was argued that while there might be some isolated cases of abuse by “rogue” police officers, most claims where simply fabricated ‘by the detainees in order for their time of detention until deportation to be shortened’ (CPT, 2001c, p. 11). According to the official account, there is simply no ill-treatment of detainees by law enforcement officials in Greece. It is impossible. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that out of 163 complaints of ill-treatment between 1996 and 2000, only 15 per cent resulted in the imposition of disciplinary sanctions following an internal administrative investigation (Amnesty International, 2005). Arguably, the police in detention made real the core of the power of the state. This is what Micol Seigel has termed as ‘violence work’, a concept which should not imply that police officers are bad people, but simply that their labour is ‘undergirded by the premise and the promise of violence’ (Seigel, 2018, p. 12). While divesting migrants of human qualities has facilitated the perpetuation of suffering inside detention places, discrediting or hiding the harm caused allowed perpetrators, as well as external observers, to remain physically and temporally remote from suffering and its effects; thus, effectively erasing their existence (Bandura, 2002). It seems that while the media and political attention had been focusing on the historically charged Greek borders, creating near hysterical responses about migrants as dangerous invaders and ticking health bombs (Dalakoglou, 2013; Karyotis, 2012; Lefkaditou, 2017), a much longer history of abuse by Greek authorities inside these borders had been obscured. The assumed temporariness of the arrivals and the peculiar insularity of police practices and facilities meant that immigrants were simply warehoused in makeshift places, hidden away from the rest of the world. 74