hold anyone accountable for gross human rights violations perpetrated by Greek authorities. It has further given supportive cues to the authorities to continue with their practices unchallenged. For the limited public visibility of these reports and actions is perceived as favourable to government actions. Despite numerous convictions and denouncements, members of the government or the police are very quick to dismiss any negative comments. ‘I want to say first and foremost that NGOs and Amnesty International do their job. And their job is to denounce. What we do, is investigate what they say. But I don’t have the sense that the latest report from Amnesty International claims what you are mentioning’, responded then Minister of Public protection, Mr Dendias to a journalist who asked about a report that described inhumane conditions in detention centres and police stations (Bamiatzis, 2013). In a similar vein, the Director of the Petrou Ralli detention centre assured me that there has been no monitoring of the centre whatsoever. ‘For several years there have been no reports on the centre and the previous ones did not make specific claims to any problems. We are ok.’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2018), he declared as he laid back on this chair. Caught between upholding human rights guarantees on the one hand and protecting its borders from excessive migration and refugee flows on the other, the Greek state has favoured repressive measures, adopting a dismissive attitude towards human rights protection and the rule of law. As a border police officer uncritically said to me ‘Those people, who talk about human rights, forget that this country has borders and we have to protect them.’ Therefore, the argument goes, if they want us to protect EU borders and prevent onward movements, then Greece should be allowed to do so in its own way. And this involves not only disregarding human rights standards but also those institutions that seek to redeem the Greek state back on to the (human) right path. Preventing human rights violations in detention: ‘A gentlemen’s agreement’ September 2018 This was the first monitoring visit of the Greek National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) to the detention facility at the Athens International Airport (Bhui et al. 2018). Three members of the NPM were present. As a delegation from the UK, including myself, was 138