Crime Law Soc Change (2018) 70:37–56 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-017-9718-y Carceral moderation and the Janus face of international pressure: A long view of Greece’s engagement with the European Convention of Human Rights Sappho Xenakis 1 & Leonidas K. Cheliotis 2 Published online: 22 February 2018 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 In recent years there has been considerable scholarly debate about the factors determining the efficacy of international human rights rules and norms. Little effort has been made, however, to bring this body of research to bear on the study of human rights violations relating to conventional imprisonment and immigration detention. This is surprising, both because of the high volume of violations known to have been occurring within prisons and immigration detention centres around the world, with a parallel rise in legal and civic forms of mobilisation seeking to address the problem, and because broad recognition has been paid to the need for considering international factors and actors when accounting for national- and local-level developments in the field of incarceration. With a view to helping fill this gap in the literature, this article examines the pressure exerted by the European human rights regime on Greece, assessing the efficacy of the pressure as such (both in terms of the acceptance and implementation of pertinent rules and norms) and identifying the array and relative significance of the forces that have given shape to it over time.1 In particular, our analysis takes a long historical perspective to gauge and account for the degree to which conditions of incarceration (including, for more recent years, immigration detention) in Greece have been influenced by the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) through derivative judicial and monitoring mechanisms: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the 1 We use the standard definition of the term ‘regime’ to denote sets of ‘implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area’ ([1]: 185). * Sappho Xenakis s.xenakis@bbk.ac.uk Leonidas K. Cheliotis l.cheliotis@lse.ac.uk 1 School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK 2 Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK