Greece, has indeed, been convicted numerous times by ECtHR for the violation of human rights inside detention. Greece has one of the highest violation rates of states signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights (European Court of Human Rights, n.d.). As Xenakis and Cheliotis (2018) show in their analysis of Greece’s engagement with the ECtHR, between 2001 and 2015, Greece received at least 55 convictions under Article 3, which prohibits torture, and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and has, thus, accrued millions in fines. At the same time, though, Greece has one of the poorest records of ECHR signatory states in implementing the judgments of the Court. The rest of this section explains how authorities involved with detention in the country has defended repeated criticisms and sanctions for non-compliant conditions. Initially, limited funding and, thus, capacity, on the part of NGOs supporting those in detention to pursue legal actions, meant that there has been no strategic dimension to litigation for migrants’ rights inside detention, preventing a collective mobilization that could advance human rights claims.90 What is more, the wide perception of the country’s judiciary being guided only by subservience to the prerogatives of the state, and the conditional and bounded ability of judicial decisions to change existing practices and prompt legal and policy change, have further restrained avenues to change (Xenakis and Cheliotis, 2018). Sofia, an experienced lawyer, was very clear about judges as conservative agents of social control. ‘But even if cases reach the court another system is in place that covers for them [the police]. There is impunity. The courts cover for them because they have certain beliefs about the state. Political beliefs. Someone comes in court with a black eye. Why don’t they ask how this has happened? Some are not interested, some think that it’s good that this happened and if the police say that it was an accident, they’ll believe it. Others also believe that all this [allegations of ill-treatment] is manufactured so that Greece is slandered.’ (Interview, Athens, 2019) As she further added later in the discussion in reference to an allegation of torture by the Coast Guard on the island of Chios. ‘The prosecutor said that there are dark centres that influence the refugees to say bad things about Greece. Behind this, there is this concept of the nation, the state, that others are going to dominate us. And there is also lack of knowledge about refugee matters, which is a compounding issue.’ (Interview, Athens, 2019). But in the words of another NGO lawyer, ‘it’s See Psychogiopoulou (2014), who examined the growing case law before ECtHR, derived from applications lodged by migrants, and identified a number of shortcomings in the protection of their rights. 90 135