Greece started receiving emergency contributions from the European Refugee Fund (7,1 million Euros) in 2008 and 2009 combined and 13,7 million Euros in 2008 from the European Border Fund to reinforce its reception/detention capacities and bolster its border patrols through new technological means (FRA, 2011). In 2009, Frontex established an office in Piraeus as the headquarters for all operations in the Eastern Mediterranean area (Human Rights Watch, 2011). The same year Frontex launched project Attica (Amnesty International and ECRE, 2010), which aimed to provide support to Greek authorities on the removal of migrants: providing experts for ‘screening’ migrants in order to identify correctly their country of origin, organising training on screening and detecting false documents, facilitating cooperation with embassies of third countries, and facilitating coordination of return flights (FIDH, 2014). These border control policies ran parallel to another system of pre-emptive, improvised measures, which had been the norm for a number of years. As a Greek border police officer told me in an interview back in 2011, ‘in the past we were more effective. The Greek government used to hire fishermen at the border to illegally transfer migrants back to Turkey’.48 Now that Europe’s eyes are on us, we cannot keep our country secure by doing the same good quality work, he continued referring to pushbacks. While this strategy may not have been an official one, border authorities did not do much to hide it. Refoulement by the Greek coast guard was occurring on such a systematic scale that border guard officers admitted they were under no obligation to inform persons subject to immediate readmission procedures of their rights and more particularly that such persons did not have the rights of notification of custody and access to lawyer (CPT, 2006). In a revealing interview with ProAsyl, the coastguard even went on to disclose that they had a policy of deliberately frightening people: ‘We drive very close to the boats and put the headlights on, to see who is there. Of course, they are not going to turn around voluntarily because they want to come here…Simply drive around them, create waves and give the people a fright – as though telling them ‘we decide what goes on here – go away!’ (ProAsyl, 2007, p.14). Amnesty International (2013) also reported that coastguard officials used to puncture or disable the inflatable boats they There is evidence of the practice of using fishermen for pushbacks, even from the 1980s. See Proti Strofi Aristera (2009) [in Greek]. 48 80