Cheliotis and Xenakis 95 compliance with international human rights-oriented pressures from the CPT and the ECtHR. The role played by Syriza’s political orientation in this regard did not itself remain untouched by economic conditions, to the extent that using its power as the senior coalition partner to introduce and sustain progressive measures on the penal front additionally provided a key means by which the party could provide a tangible demonstration of its commitment to engendering a fundamental leftward shift in Greek politics and society against the background of lingering continuities on the economic front. This was the case both during its first few months in office, when uncertainty was mounting as to whether debt restructuring and an end to austerity were attainable, and even more so thereafter, following the much-reviled new loan agreement the government reached relatively swiftly with the Troika in the summer of 2015. Similarly – and this applies to the junior coalition partner, too, which did not substantively oppose Syriza’s prison reform plans –, resistance to US pressure against the liberalisation of parole also furnished an opportunity to display resistance to undue external meddling in Greek domestic affairs at a juncture when the government was otherwise descending further into a humiliating state of economic subjugation to foreign powers. Yet economic pressures, including fiscal restrictions imposed by the Troika, concurrently limited the government’s ability to fund progressive prison reforms, which ultimately meant – in combination with the fact that prisoner numbers remained stubbornly high, largely as a result of judicial obstinacy – that conditions in Greek prisons continued to be dire. On the immigration detention front, the scope for the Syriza-led government to achieve its progressive ambitions was even more limited – and from very early on at that. Here, too, Syriza was successful in bringing about a liberalising shift in pertinent state discourse, notwithstanding xenophobic views expressed in the media by the junior coalition partner. Yet pressures placed on Greece by the EU as to how the country should deal with issues of migration, including how it could spend EU funds in this respect, worked to undermine the plans the senior coalition partner had for reforming the country’s immigration detention system. Under concerted pressure from the EU, including notably the threat of what would have been an economically catastrophic expulsion from the Schengen accord, the Greek government was forced into stemming the outflows of irregular migrants towards Western Europe by recourse in effect to mass mandatory detention practices that contravened regional and international human rights law alike. This, combined with the unprecedented magnitude of the influx of irregular migrants that Greece experienced from the mid-2010s onwards, meant that the use of immigration detention intensified during Syriza’s stay in office, save for a brief initial decline. So much so, indeed, that, despite an expansion in the overall capacity of the country’s immigration detention system, overcrowding and associated problems continued to bedevil detention sites around the country. Compounding the situation was the fact that detainees were increasingly kept under closed, prison-like conditions, itself yet another negative development that bore the EU’s imprint, to the extent, first, that the Union’s deal with Turkey in 2016 turned existing ‘hotspot’ reception sites into de facto closed centres for future deportees; and second, that the much-needed EU funding set aside to support Greece’s management of its migration burden was essentially attached to curtailing the liberty of irregular migrants. All in all, then, it is not simply that the Syriza-led government’s political orientation was overridden by prevailing economic conditions; it is also that Greece’s