736 European Journal of Criminology 10(6) and put you in a centre, and you will stay there until you go back, then there will be no clientele for Greece. The trafficker, then, may want to sell his product, but there will be no public to sell it to. Interviewer: Let’s hope so, given that at least over the last decade, [Greece] was for tourist offices, as you mean them, the best destination. […] The Seychelles of illegal immigration. Minister: It’s exactly as you put it. (SKAI, 4 October 2012) As with the very fact of administrative detention, Minister Dendias also attributed a deterrent potential to the specific conditions under which irregular migrants are held in Greece. An immigration detention centre, he stated, ‘is not a space where one can have a party’, or a ‘hotel’. Conditions in Greek immigration detention centres, he went on to say, stand at the ‘lowest acceptable civilised minimum’, as they, too, may contribute to the goal of discouraging illegal immigration by sending a message that the country is ‘unfriendly’ to it. Indeed, Dendias suggested, the deterrent effect of administrative detention as such is inversely proportional to the particular quality of detention conditions (SKAI, 4 October 2012). In the same interview, the minister made the further assertion that Greece respects and observes the standards set by the European Union. This assertion not only indirectly denied the mass of independent reports attesting to the contrary. Nor did the minister’s assertion simply imply that conditions in Greek immigration detention centres are as good as or no worse than elsewhere in the continent. It also paved the way to the claim that responsibility for at least some of the centres’ most controversial aspects (e.g. the use of containers to house detainees) rests beyond the Greek state itself (SKAI, 4 October 2012). Similarly, the very reliance on immigration detention pending deportation was described by the minister as an unavoidable choice according to international experience, as ‘the internationally accepted and sole mechanism of confronting migratory flows’. This was despite the fact that many different domestic and foreign groups and organisations, including formal European authorities, have long been calling upon the Greek state seriously to consider alternatives to administrative detention of migrants, especially for vulnerable groups such as unaccompanied children and pregnant women (see e.g. Amnesty International, 2010; ICJ and ECRE, 2013; Pro Asyl, 2012; UNHCHR, 31 January 2013). Greek state authorities have also evoked financial difficulties in an effort to explain away responsibility for the conditions in immigration detention centres across the country, particularly since the financial crisis hit Greece in 2009 (Cheliotis, in progress). Although here it is recognised, at least implicitly, that action should be taken to improve conditions of detention, Greece’s failure to take such action has, in fact, been due to how funding is administered, much more so than a matter of limited financial resources. To take one example relating to the administration of domestic funding, in 2011, two years into the financial crisis, the Greek state chose to pay €1.38 million towards the renovation and conversion into a museum of the Nebojsa Tower in Belgrade, in order to honour a hero of the struggle for Greek independence who was imprisoned and put to death there Downloaded from euc.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on November 25, 2013