countering undocumented migration and to ensure a credible and effective £U 2 In fact, the existing data on the number of immigration policy (£C, 2008). deportations from the detention centres in different £U countries calls into question the need for detention as a condition to assure an effective removal policy (on the Italian case see Andrijasevic, 2006: 123). In Greece in 2007 only 29.14 per cent of individuals 'arrested to be deported' were actually deported back to their countries.3 More likely, deportations take place from Greece to transit countries and overall there have been relatively few formal, legal deportations to Turkey under the terms of the Greece-Turkey readmission agreement of 2001 (HRW, 2008: 36). The fact that these detention centres do not even serve their official function of facilitating the expulsion of 'irregular migrants' is only one of many paradoxical and problematic elements of the EU regime. Significantly, the first official initiative of the No Border network was the European-wide protest against the 2 EC (2008) Directiveof the European Parliament and of the Council on common standards and proceduresin MemberStates for returningillegally stayingthirdcountrynationals (as published in the officialJournalL348 of 24.12.2008). 3 Namely,58,602 arrested; 17,077 deported, of whom 14,403 were Albanians (HRW, 2008: 35, note 69). special summit of the £U ministers of justice and the interior in Tampere in 1999, which set up the £U as an 'area of freedom, security and justice'. The summit signalled the beginning of the process by which member states standardized their asylum and migration policies according to a more restrictive framework. The No Border activists denounced the aims of the summit for increasing the exclusion, control and deportations of migrants. No Border camps soon became one of the network's main projects. The first was held at the German-Polish border in 1998, after which many more proliferated in 'borderzones' worldwide. These camps are set up as spaces in which to exchange experience, to engage in political education and debate, and take direct action against the regime of border controls. Against a vision that understands immigration as merely a contradictory 'outcome' or 'after-effect' of 'the excesses of world-wide capitalism' (Kopp and Schneider, 2003), and which argues for reduction of repressive migration controls on purely humanitarian grounds, the No Border activists condemn the fundamental injustice of immigration and border controls as such. Their position stresses the need to acknowledge the potential of both global migration and new transnational networking for social movements tackling In this sense the free exchange and circulation of ideas and experiences through new networkingtechnologies have always accompanied the No Border demands for the freedom of movement.4 However, when protesting globalization. against particular detention centres the No Border position has to face the ambivalent migrationpolitics and practices of detention enacted by EU governments. the gendered detention management of migrants' 4 For the historyof the No Border networkand the campaign 'no one is illegal' see Kopp and Schneider,2003, http://www.make worlds.org/node/29. The partial 'liberation' offered to the migrant women in Lesvos is not the first case in which the authorities have responded with 'exceptional measures' to 140 feminist review 94 2010 ofLesvos acrosstheborders This content downloaded from 163.1.255.60 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 17:57:53 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions