Carceral moderation and the Janus face of international pressure 41 indirectly generate financial costs to a non-compliant state [18]. Even criticism levied by non-governmental bodies, which has been found to have a closer association with improved human rights outcomes than that issued by intergovernmental organisations, has proven to be of uneven effectiveness [20], contributing to improved human rights outcomes in autocracies but with no effect or even a worsening of outcomes in democracies and hybrid regimes [21]. A different influential line of argument privileges the domestic arena, focusing on the notion of national institutional capacity as the primary determinant of compliance with international human rights rules and norms. Studies have found national compliance to be positively correlated with stronger and more efficient national bureaucracies, although no association has been found between levels of compliance and levels of national economic development (see, e.g., [10, 11, 22, 23]). At the same time, the thesis that non-compliance is often inadvertent and conditioned by a state’s ability to implement pertinent rules and norms [23] has chimed with the rise of ‘co-operative’ approaches to compliance within Europe, which have seen political and policy elites advocating technical assistance and supportive language – rather than naming and shaming – as the most appropriate means of dealing with non-compliance [4]. Interpreted in this way, however, the privileging of domestic capacity as an explanans of differential compliance has given rise to concerns that states which do not comply are thereby effectively exculpated, when – as human rights NGOs have pointed out – violations are often the outcome of deliberate state policy, rather than of a state’s failure to act or lack of capacity to protect (ibid.). Others have pointed to a wider array of factors that determine domestic capacity to comply with international rules and norms, from the openness of political decisionmaking to external influence ([24]; see also [25]), to the health of national finances, to the broader socio-political culture in the country and levels of awareness and education amongst those who would be rule and norm promoters (e.g., NGO activists, lawyers and prosecutors; see further [26]). Indeed, it is striking that even in Europe – a region where human rights have been described as having become ‘embedded in the politicocultural ideal’ [27], and which enjoys relatively strong institutional capacities across its membership – member-states have tended to comply only partially with adverse ECtHR rulings against them, typically treating their human rights compliance obligations ‘like choices on a menu’ [11]. In sum, three basic arguments can be distilled from the above review to explain the ineffectiveness of international pressures in promoting national compliance with human rights rules and norms. First, states may have signed up to the international regime but have performed insufficiently due to various ‘capacity’ limitations in the domestic arena. Secondly, resistance by non-compliant states may be explained instead by reference to the fact that the social and material costs imposed by international actors have been inadequate to overcome the inertia or incentives behind non-compliance. Thirdly, the resistance of non-compliant states to international pressure may be accounted for by the existence of a powerful international counter-regime that serves to undermine the potency of the international human rights regime itself. In what follows, we explore these arguments in the context of Greece, with particular reference to Greece’s longstanding failure to comply with the ECHR in the fields of imprisonment and immigrant detention.