392 Social & Legal Studies 34(3) Unless deprivation of liberty is justified in an individual case under the Reception Conditions Directive 2013/33/EU, asylum applicants should be allowed to leave the facility and return to it, when possible facilitated through public transport. Human rights organizations like Amnesty only qualify the situation in the new camp in Samos as detention for those categories of asylum seekers that were, temporarily, not allowed to leave the centre at all (Amnesty International, 2021, 2024). Consequently, by simply allowing asylum seekers to leave during the day, the procedural safeguards and the limited number of accepted grounds connected to a deprivation of liberty do not apply, even if the centre looks like a prison and is experienced as such by its inhabitants. In the next section I will argue for a somewhat broader conception of detention, on the basis of the concept of ‘subsistence exchange contracts’. Subsistence Exchange Contracts The concept of subsistence exchange contracts has been introduced by Elizabeth Ashford (Ashford, 2015), influenced by the writings of Henry Shue. Ashford deals with the human right to subsistence from a moral philosophical point of view. She uses the notion of subsistence exchange contracts to argue that we ought to take the right to subsistence seriously. A subsistence exchange contract is defined by her as the situation in which destitute individuals agree to severely harmful treatment, or forgoing their negative human rights, in exchange for subsistence. According to her, such ‘contracts’ pose a threat to the enjoyment of other rights ‘that is just as severe as the threat posed by extreme standard coercion’. An example of extreme standard coercion would be holding someone at gunpoint in order to make him/her do something. This qualifies as coercion as it is a threat that proposes to make its recipient worse off than (s)he would have been otherwise, which is the definition of a standard (libertarian) concept of coercion (Anderson, 2023). To explain the concept of subsistence exchange contracts, Ashford uses Shue’s example of a torture contract. This is a contract a destitute individual enters into with a sadistic millionaire, in which (s)he forgoes her/his right against torture in exchange for subsistence. Since such a contract does not involve the threat of harm, but rather increases the range of options of the individual, it is possible to argue that the situation does not involve coercion, or, at least, not a severe threat to the enjoyment of a negative human right. This argument relies on the fact that the proposer of such a contract does not wrongfully introduce the situation of destitution,8 but, instead, provides the individual with a way out of it. Put differently, the destitute individual agrees to the contract because (s)he gets something out of it, so (s)he chooses to waive or renounce the right not to be tortured in order to receive something of value, for example, food or shelter, in exchange. The question whether offers can, under certain circumstances, be classified as coercive has been subject to debate amongst philosophers for many years (summarized, e.g. in: Anderson, 2023; Kiener, 2020). Ashford, however, argues that classifying such a contract as coercion is unnecessary and, moreover, liable to be misleading. It can be misleading because it may lead to a ‘moral focus on the wrongfulness of the behavior of the people offering the subsistence exchange contracts, by labeling them as coercers’ (Ashford,