Carceral moderation and the Janus face of international pressure 43 Greece’s political leadership, whilst years of thorough political purging ensured that the country’s judiciary, being guided only by subservience to the prerogatives of government, posed no challenge to substantive political disinterest in the ECHR. The proactivity of Greece in upholding international compliance with the ECHR during the same period challenges this interpretation, however. In 1956, within three short years of incorporating the ECHR into domestic legislation, the Greek government launched a challenge to the first-ever attempt by a member of the CoE to derogate from the ECHR. Greece’s 1956 petition of the ECtHR concerned Britain’s use of emergency powers in Cyprus, claiming that the level of threat to life on the island was insufficient to justify Britain’s derogation under Article 15 of the treaty, and that the British were violating the human rights of Greek Cypriots by deporting and imprisoning suspects illegally, flogging juveniles, imposing collective punishments, and torturing individuals. When the CoE removed the accusations of torture from the petition, the Greek government took the step of raising them at the UN as well as returning a new petition about British torture practices in Cyprus to the ECtHR the following year [33]. Greece dropped its complaints two years later as part of the Zurich peace agreement for the island. Whilst the British had impeded the work of the CoE sub-commission to which they had reluctantly agreed and the investigators’ report was never published, the Greek petition arguably succeeded in shaming Britain into ceasing some of its abusive practices on the island [34]. Thus, prior to Greece’s own invocation of Article 15 of the ECHR in 1967, the country had clearly demonstrated familiarity and engagement with the Convention, as well as with the limitations of the ECtHR. Indeed, it is Greece’s very experience as a notable prior petitioner of the ECtHR that helps to explain why the country’s government made the effort of applying for derogation from the ECHR shortly after the military coup of 1967. Despite Greece’s apparently keen engagement with the ECHR early on, soft and hard pressure subsequently exerted by the country’s international human rights critics was unable to bring a halt to human rights abuses under the junta. In September 1967, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark lodged an application at the ECtHR concerning eight violations of the ECHR by Greece (ranging from mass internment and trials before extraordinary court martial to media censorship), to which a further violation, of Article 3, was subsequently added following the publication of reports by Amnesty International about torture being carried out by the Greek authorities ([35]: 80). Indeed, NGOs such as Amnesty International played an important role in mobilising European publics against the junta’s crimes, and thereby also indirectly influenced the stance European governments took towards Greece. In late 1969, the European Commission of Human Rights rejected Greece’s application to derogate from the ECHR and found multiple violations, including torture and ill-treatment of political detainees as well as unacceptable conditions of detention [26]. This step came after a decision by the European Parliament in 1967 to freeze the EEC association agreement with Greece, including negotiations over issues such as agricultural policy harmonisation, $56 million of EEC development loans and further development financing [36]. Rather than comply in the face of these external pressures, Greece invoked the abuses of the British in Cyprus [37], denied the truth of the allegations, rebuked the CoE for unduly intervening in the sovereign affairs of the Greek state, and anticipated the country’s expulsion from the CoE by withdrawing from the organisation itself in