In line with Bandura (2002) on selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency, By the end of this formative era of Greek immigration detention, the Greek detention regime had formed its defining characteristics of cruelty infused by racist ideas about the migrant other. Near the end of 2000, there would be three operative facilities specifically for aliens and plans were made to construct appropriate facilities at the seat of every Police Directorate, including buying a building of 9,000 m² (with a capacity of 468 persons) to house the Aliens and Transfer Centre in Attica (what would later be called the Petrou Ralli detention centre). This facility, the Government claimed, would offer ‘a comprehensive solution’ of the problems cited by CPT in its reports (CPT, 2001c, p. 17). However, as it would be sorely proven later, the deep political addiction to controlling and confining migration left the fundamental harms of detaining immigrants masked and unresolved. The situation inside detention facilities would soon only become worse. Building the detention estate (2001-2009) On 15 March 2011, the CPT made a public statement concerning Greece, due to ‘the persistent lack of action to improve the situation in light of the Committee’s recommendations, as regards the detention of irregular migrants’ (CPT, 2011, p. 2). But what had happened before that? The public statement was preceded by 10 delegation visits (between 1993 and 2011) and subsequent calls for action to protect the human rights of detained non-citizens, as well as a large number of human rights reports documenting the squalid conditions in the country’s immigration detention establishments. This section aims to unravel what led to the CPT public statement and cast light on the era during which the Greek authorities started building the detention estate. A new phase in immigration law? On March 6 2001, the European Court of Human Rights convicted Greece for violations of article 3 and 5 of the Convention (Dougoz v Greece, 1998). More specifically, the court considered that ‘the conditions of detention of the applicant at the Alexandras police headquarters and the Drapetsona detention centre, in particular the serious overcrowding 75