to be very much in line with the culture of abuse and impunity that is nurtured inside the Greek police. Riot police and in general excessive violence to quell protests seem to be activated by reflex. In the words of an NGO lawyer, ‘the prison mentality is so prevalent that police officers treat them [detainees] as would-be rioters. So, they are ready to suppress any resistance at any time.’ (Interview, Athens, 2018) Many of the detainees who have been involved in protest actions in detention are charged with criminal acts such as “revolting”, “civil disorder”, “grievous bodily harm against an officer” etc. An NGO lawyer I interviewed, indeed, testified that there has been a clear criminalisation of protest trend since 2017.130 Yet, this is nothing but new. As early as 2010, the Group of Lawyers for the Rights of Migrants and Refugees reported that 42 detained men at the Venna special holding facility staged an upheaval protesting against the conditions, which so flagrantly violated fundamental elements of human dignity. The migrants were tried by the Three Member Misdemeanours Court of Rhodopi without access to a lawyer and without the necessary interpretation. They were sentenced to 4-8 months imprisonment and to deportation for disobedience and/or for causing damages. By 2016, the Ministry of Migration was discussing the creation of new detention centres to use them as segregation units for those deemed unruly (Spathopoulou and Carastathis, 2020) The criminalisation process, indeed, involves bringing detainees to the court without any means to defend themselves, which in most cases ends up with them being convicted for a variety of acts.131 They then end up in prison for more or less long periods and often with a deportation decision. They disappear in prison where often NGOs and activists lose track of them. Even if contact is kept it is nearly impossible to offer legal support due to high expenses in felony cases (Deportation Monitoring Aegean, 2019). However, even if This is further evident in refugee camps too. Two notable cases stand out. The case of Moria 6, six young people who were accused of the fire that burned the Moria camp down with very little evidence of the involvement. Two of them, minors, were tried and convicted to 5 years imprisonment and the rest of them were sentenced to 10 years in prison. None of the fifteen witnesses who testified in court could identify the defendants and the only person, who did, did not appear in court. In a similar but even more grueling case, a pregnant woman who lived in Moria with her husband and three children tried to commit suicide by setting her self on fire. She was charged with 'aggravated arson with intent, resulting in danger to human life and property (Mare Librum, 2021). 130 Recently there has also been a coordinated attempt to accuse newly arrived immigrants of human smuggling. Under this system of punishment and incarceration, immigrants are arrested, beaten, held for months in pre-trial detention, until they are convicted in a court with absolutely no access to procedural rights for driving the boats that brought them to Greece. Some were not aware of committing a felony, when they took in charge to bring a boat in distress to shore, others were simply on the boat and others were even tricked by the authorities to drive the boat, only to find out they had been charged later on. Most of them are sentenced to life long imprisonment (Hänsel, et al., 2020) 131 188