preparedness to cope with the ever-evolving situation, as it prohibited any considerations or actions towards establishing an alternative system of (mainland-based) reception. It is primarily in this context that the response’s very foundation, structured as it is around the EU’s increasing tendency to externalize and avoid its common responsibilities (EU-Turkey Statement), Turkey’s denial of accepting back any asylum seekers that have been transferred off the islands (as per to-day practice),192 and Greece’s willingness to oblige, a priori conditions the response’s potential results to a spectrum of diverging degrees of “discounts”, but never the respect of human rights. Indeed, the latter has perhaps become nowhere near more evident than in the events that followed the recent ruling of the Greek Council of State (CoS) –Greece’s highest administrative court– on the geographical restriction of asylum seekers to the island hotspots. On the 17th of April 2018, and following legal actions undertaken by GCR, the Greek CoS ruled in favor of annulling the restriction on liberty imposed on newly-arrived asylum seekers on the islands. An imposition, to be noted, which only became accessible to public scrutiny and legal action more than a year following the Statement’s implementation, through a decision belatedly issued by the former Head of the GAS, on May 31, 2017.193 That being said, the CoS judged that said decision did not contain the necessary-legal justification for limiting newcomers’ freedom to the islands (indeed, said decision contained no justification, at all),194 thus calling for its withdrawal. Furthermore, and though the ruling focused near exclusively on the decision’s technical aspects, without so much as a reference to the restriction’s effects on refugees’ and asylum seekers’ lives, the CoS still did recognize the actual and “serious danger of arising social tensions”,195 posed by the unequal distribution/concentration of large numbers of persons in a limited array of geographical regions (i.e. the hotspot islands), instead of the wider territory. This could have been an opportunity to redress the ongoing abasement of human rights and values within the EU. Instead, just three days later, on the 20th of April 2018 and in what has become a highly criticized move,196 the newly appointed Director of the GAS went forward with reinstating the geographical limitation. Albeit, this time, the imposition was accompanied by an official justification, invoking grounds of “public order and especially…the implementation of the Joint EU-Turkey Statement of 18-32016”.197 Fast-forward to the 23rd of April (six days following the ruling), in an incident that arguably echoed the CoS’s recognition of the risk of social tensions, a group of Afghan refugees were brutally attacked at the Sappho square, in Lesvos. The refugees, who had for six days been protesting at the square against delays in the examination of their (asylum) claims and living conditions at the Moria RIC, were thrown at with stones and various other objects (Molotov cocktails and tear gas grenades, amongst others), while far-right segments of the gathered crowd were calling for their extermination (“burn them alive”).198 55