On 14/4/2021 the curtain fell on the four courts that judged the attack of Revolutionary Struggle against the Central Bank of Greece, the ECB branch in Greece and the IMF, action that took place on 10/4/2014.
The decision to sentence me to 6 years for »simple complicity» in the attack and 3 months for »stealing the car» used in the action, shows the huge discrepancy with the first judicial sentence imposed on me, which was life imprisonment and 26 years of imprisonment. A discrepancy that does not have to do (only) with changes in the penal code, but reflects the distance between the judgment of different courts on the same issues, a distance that is mainly due to the different approaches to the cases that could not but have a political background. The frenzied vengeful attitude of the first two courts that tried me and comrade Nikos Maziotis to the maximum penalty for this action of Revolutionary Struggle is not explained by the existence of the Hun legal fossil of Article 270 of the Penal Code on the explosion, which was enacted in 1969 by the Colonial Junta to impose life sentences on those who chose attacks as resistance against that regime. After all, no post-Junta court has ever imposed a life sentence for any bombing and Article 270 of the Constitution is, in fact, ineffective to enforce its extreme version. Until only two courts imposed life imprisonment on me and Nikos Maziotis, making full use of this legal monstrosity of the Junta for political revenge.
Knowing the history of this law, we had repeatedly highlighted it, both in court and in texts we had made public, speaking of the need to withdraw it. The fact that it has «endured» so many years is not due to the negligence of the countless lawyers who have «served» in the legislature since 75, but to a conscious political decision, initially due to the explosive «post-coup» social period, in which there were many massive social reactions (riots, wildcat strikes, attacks, etc.). But his extreme version was never applied in other cases in the forty years since the end of the colonels’ junta.
In court during my appeal – following the prosecutor’s proposal – I said that the obsessively hostile attitude of the courts towards us is linked to political pressures on judges, which need not always be direct, but can be formed in a very vindictive political environment created around us by the executive, and which, combined with the personal political attitude of the judges and their personal ambitions for career advancement, form the conditions of the trials as the reasons why the executive and the legislature chose professional judges instead of citizens of the mixed jury to judge dynamic political opponents of the regime had been mentioned by I. Manoledakis saying: »… judges, subjected to hierarchical dependence and expecting their professional development within a hierarchically structured body, may be subjected to pressures in the opposite – punitive – direction, which is not the case with lay judges. As for the professional hardening of professional judges, which makes them stricter than lay judges, this, in my opinion, is not an advantage but a disadvantage for the administration of justice.» («Security and Liberty») Continue reading “Greece: Conclusions of the Revolutionary Struggle Trials for the Attack on the Central Bank of Greece (ECB Branch) & IMF – Pola Roupa”