and deprivation of liberty for the purpose of article 5 ECHR. Since March 2022, all newly arrived
protection seekers to Samos are indiscriminately prohibited from leaving up to 25 days, without
individual assessment and solely on the basis that they are an applicant of international
protection, contrary to article 8 of Directive 2013/33/EU. For this reason, the European
Commission has initiated infringement proceedings against Greece regarding article 40 (23). In
the next section, I address the different interpretations and practical implementations of the
restriction to newly arrived people.
These official measures, compounding with the CCAC’s infrastructure, constitute detention.
Spivak described how ‘sophisticated vocabulary’ was weaponised to conceal the work of
sanctioned ignorance. In this brief analysis of the legal basis for restrictions, the law and legal
categories are weaponised to conceal what inevitably amounts to detention. The European
Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) described this as a common practice by EU states ‘to
qualify places of detention as something else…in order to circumvent their obligations to avoid
arbitrary deprivation of liberty’ (24). Even after this 25-day period, the infrastructure and social
control continues and re-establishes the CCAC as a space of de facto detention. IHR’s report
importantly highlighted that the ‘far-reaching and cumulative measures affecting people when
they arrive on Samos effectively and presumptively’ produce a situation of de facto detention
(21). In the ECtHR decision of Guzzardi v Italy, the Court found that factors may ‘cumulatively and
in combination’ give rise to an article 5 violation (25). For this reason, measures which may not
alone produce detention are important to a finding of unlawful and arbitrary detention of
people seeking international protection. In the fourth section, this paper goes further to argue
that the space of detention is produced by the culmination of these pervasive social and
material controls, and by the Greek and EU authorities weaponising a sanctioned ignorance
when implementing sudden changes or confining people to an ‘imaginary waiting room’. As
stated above, this helps generate the ‘feeling’ of being detained. Moreover, this postcolonial
analysis situates the CCAC within the historical and colonial legacy of bordering Europe and
containing racialised people.
3. Weaponising ignorance as changing detention practices
At least four different unofficial approaches ‘restricting’ people to the CCAC have recently been
observed by IHR. These approaches are dictated by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum and/or
the Reception and Identification Service (RIS), the state authority under the Ministry responsible
for the CCAC. They are then implemented by RIS staff, G4S contracted by the RIS, and the
Hellenic Police. As the population of the CCAC began to increase, these approaches progressed.
Instead of practices that might help reduce the number of people detained, the changes
themselves produce conditions which make the facility seem overwhelmed, but nonetheless
allow the RIS to consolidate control over the population and result in mass de facto detention of
people to the centre. This section argues that these changes weaponise ignorance to reproduce detention; first, by ignoring the effect that different applications of this ‘restriction’ have
on freedom of movement. Second, that they project an ignorance onto people within the CCAC,
refusing them information on when they will be able to leave, how to challenge detention, and
ultimately access to legal services. The measures which produce detention may appear
mundane
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