minimum standards of hygiene, raising questions about its racist and discriminatory nature and use (CPT, 2014). Indeed, the aim of these controversial decisions was unambiguously clear. ‘If they told me go to a country, you’ll stay in detention for three months and then you’ll be free to steal, rob, do anything I want, I’d say fine. So, we aimed for detention…and then we increased it up to 18 months. For what reason? We have to make their lives unlivable’, the Head of Greek Police Force stated to his officers (Camera Stylo, 2013 [in Greek]). The premise of this statement could helpfully be understood as the “politics of exhaustion”, a new technology of border control, which aims to deter, exclude and control through the mental and physical exhaustion of individuals (Welander, 2021). Unsurprisingly, in line with this harmful set of (micro) practices and methods, mounting evidence showed a humanitarian crisis was brewing across the country’s detention facilities, especially the ones situated at border areas (Amnesty International, 2010a; 2012a; Fili, 2013; Human Rights Watch, 2011; Medicins Sans Frontieres, 2014, Pro Asyl, 2012). In 2011, faced with repeated failures on the part of Greek authorities to improve the conditions of immigration detention, CPT issued a public statement, the first ever addressed to an EU member state, to condemn detention conditions in Greece.65 As recommendations were continually left unanswered or unaddressed, the CPT concluded that the conditions in which irregular migrants were held would appear to be ‘a deliberate policy by the authorities in order to deliver a clear message that only persons with the necessary identity papers should attempt to enter Greece’ (CPT, 2012, p. 9). For the period 2010-2015, a snapshot of any detention centre at any time would show overcrowding so high that often detainees had to sleep in shifts. As I have noted elsewhere (Fili, 2013) and also experienced myself as an NGO practitioner working at the airport detention facility, more than 100 people were forced to stay in nine single or double occupancy cells. When it was crowded like this, the men could not all lie down at the same time. In other cases, especially at border locations, men, women, and children were held together. Access to the dormitories in border guard stations in Northern Greece required To provide background to this statement, this is the fifth time the CPT has used this exceptional measure against countries; the first time in Turkey in 1992 and then again in 1996 and in Russia in 2001, 2003, 2005 for the situation in Chechnya. 65 105