734 European Journal of Criminology 10(6) activist groups, but also politicians from various political parties, some of whom have themselves participated in inspection visits to Greek immigration detention centres. For example, following a series of visits to Greek immigration detention centres in her capacity as a member of a delegation of the Council of Europe, German leftist parliamentarian Annette Groth said that ‘the situation [in Greece] resembles nothing like the human rights we talk about in Europe, this policy of mass detention in deplorable conditions of all incoming migrants and refugees. For the latter, it is equivalent to denying them the right to asylum any longer’ (IPS, 17 March 2013). Groth has also argued that the term ‘detention centre’ is a euphemism in the Greek context, and that what are called in Greece detention centres are, in fact, conventional prisons (To Vima, 23 January 2013). John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia, has similarly described irregular migrants’ treatment in Greece, including the conditions of their administrative detention, as being embarrassingly un-European, ‘totally unworthy of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning European Union, and so far below international human rights standards as to make a mockery of them’ (Amnesty International, 2012b). In an accumulating number of cases, meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights has ordered Greece to pay damages to irregular migrants who had been held in administrative detention in the country under inhumane and degrading conditions, in contravention of international human rights treaties of which Greece is a signatory. In January 2011, moreover, the Court issued the more general ruling that detention practices in Greece violated Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, and ordered that other EU member states cease transferring migrants to Greece under the Dublin-II agreement, or else they would be knowingly exposing them to conditions of detention that amount to degrading treatment, thus violating their own international obligations (see further Human Rights Watch, 2011; Pro Asyl, 2012). For commentators such as British Conservative Member of the European Parliament Timothy Kirkhope, however, Europe should adopt an even more punitive stance towards Greece. ‘If the UK or France had such inadequate systems and poor asylum conditions as Greece’, Kirkhope has argued, ‘then I have no doubt the Commission would come down on us like a ton of bricks’ (Daily Express, 22 December 2011). Neither domestic and international criticism, nor judicial intervention and calls for more punitive action against Greece at the European level, have so far succeeded in bringing about fundamental changes in the use and conditions of administrative detention in the country. A number of reports have come to light over the years, including notably an ‘exceptional’ public statement by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) in March 2011, emphasising the continuing failure of the Greek state to follow pertinent recommendations and improve the situation (CPT, 2011; see also CPT, 2012; Financial Times, 15 March 2011; Pro Asyl, 2012; To Vima, 10 April 2013). As recently as January 2013, Vladimir Tochilovsky, member of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that had just concluded a fact-finding mission in Greece, told a press conference that the Greek state had made some progress in terms of legislative provisions (e.g. setting safeguards for the fair and efficient examination of applications for asylum). But Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013