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Athens, Greece: Claim of responsibility for the incendiary attacks against the homes of high-profile judges – Direct Action Cells/Sacco and Vanzetti Cell

Posted on 2022/11/13 by darknights

The Greek justice system doesn’t have a problem, it is the problem itself

Direct Action Cells claim responsibility for the following incendiary attacks:

At the home of the judge Panagiota Yioupi, at dawn on Friday October 14, in the Glyfada area.

Youpi is one of the many servile puppets of the gang that operates under the name of Greek justice. She presided in the trial of the child rapist and member of the Mitsotakis family, Dimitris Lignadis, who was released from prison after being found guilty of raping underage children. She is a judge who is part of the influential entourage of the drug-dealing shipping tycoon Vangelis Marinakis, having issued a series of provocative rulings in favor of his interests during her term as a judge in Piraeus.

Yioupi is relentless when confronted with the poor, handing out years of sentences with the same ease she would hand out toys at a children’s party. But she has a peculiarity, she turns into a sensitive and soulful person when confronted by people from high society, with political connections, access and financial clout.

At the home of the judge Myrsini Papachiou, at dawn on Saturday, November 5, in the Zografou area.

Papachiou occupies the highest levels of the cesspool known as civil justice. The throne that she sits on as vice president of the Supreme Court is built from the pain of shattered human lives destroyed by prison.

Our decision to target her, apart from her institutional role, is related to the fact that she is currently involved in the Novartis scandal, being a member of the special court that is currently trying state prosecutors and government officials from the former SYRIZA government, as defendants for allegedly orchestrating a conspiracy in this particular case. She is also a court tribunal member for the upcoming trial of a former SYRIZA minister in a case regarding TV licenses. In fact, in order for Papahiou to be a member of these tribunals, she was hastily promoted to the rank of deputy-president a few days before the selection of tribunal members took place. Without any desire to get involved in the shifting alliances and infighting of this rotten political establishment, we recognize that this court is acting as a white-washing machine for sections of the political elite who are involved in the Novartis scandal. An international scandal that demonstrates with surgical precision how capitalism works. Multinationals, big pharma and politicians were complicit in the criminal regulation of drug prices in the health sector. They were complicit in the dismantling of public hospitals, in the operation of an organized international state-economic mafia that exploited in the worst possible way one of the most basic services, that of health. The government’s systematic attempt to present this scandal as a frame-up goes hand in hand with its refusal to demand compensation from the company. Our choice to strike at one of the puppets that are part of the government’s white-washing is intended to highlight all of the above. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Claim of responsibility for the incendiary attacks against the homes of high-profile judges – Direct Action Cells/Sacco and Vanzetti Cell” →

Greece: Text by Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle, on the Denial of Exit Permit

Posted on 2021/07/13 - 2021/07/13 by darknights

I am already serving 8.5 years in prison for the activities of the organization Revolutionary Struggle. I have been sentenced for all the attacks of the organization to 137 years in total, of which the new CP stipulates that in 20 years are suspended. According to the «penitentiary» code, even with the latest modifications made by the government last November, when it increased the limits for granting leave to convicts with 10 years or more of sentence – from 1/5 of the sentence as it was before, to 3/10 – I am entitled to be granted a short leave, since instead of the 6 years required for someone with 20 years of sentence, I have served 8.5 years. I should also point out that I have served most of my sentence to the limit of being eligible for parole at 3/5th of it, as stipulated by law for decades. In fact, as I have been informed by the secretariat of the Domokos C.C. where I am detained, in the first months of 2022 I will serve 3/5 of my sentence. That is to say, the 12 years gross of the 20 years of imprisonment which will then include more than 9 years of my stay in prison plus 3 years of working days of beneficial computation in the serving of my sentence.

The granting of short furlough days to prisoners, which has been legislated following prisoner struggles, is essentially a transitional stage in the preparation of prisoners from confinement to release with restrictive conditions due to the suspension of serving the remaining 2/5ths of the sentence. Continue reading “Greece: Text by Nikos Maziotis, Member of Revolutionary Struggle, on the Denial of Exit Permit” →

Greece: Conclusions of the Revolutionary Struggle Trials for the Attack on the Central Bank of Greece (ECB Branch) & IMF – Pola Roupa

Posted on 2021/07/13 by darknights

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” →