And justice for all

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

Two men convicted last week of being accessories in a brutal attack that killed a young Australian on Myconos were released from custody after appealing jail sentences totalling almost 16 years. On the same day, a Briton held, based on questionable testimonies and no apparent evidence, for seven months for alleged manslaughter on Zakynthos was denied a third bail request without any indication of when his trial will be held. If we needed confirmation of the disorder, the apathy, the warped logic, the injustice that pervades Greece’s justice system, we got it.

This country owes a lot to Oliver Zammit, the father of 20-year-old Doujon who was killed on Myconos in the summer of 2008. Oliver donated his son’s organs to Greeks. The least he deserved from us was justice.

He got this in some form last week when a court on Lesvos sentenced his son’s killer, Marios Antonopoulos, to 22.5 years in jail, though not for murder but on a lesser charge of inflicting fatal injury. The court also convicted two other bar workers, Dimitris Varonos and Giorgos Hadzioannou, for their part in the attack.

Releasing convicted criminals on appeal is a necessary part of the judicial system as it gives them an opportunity to better prepare their next defense and allows someone wrongly convicted to avoid the indignity of being locked up. However, the rights of the victim and his family, not just the convicts, must be taken into account. Varonos and Hadzioannou were not convicted of shoplifting but of taking part in an assault that was so vicious, it left its victim in a coma from which he could never recover. The decision to release them seems reckless and insulting.

It’s no wonder that Oliver Zammit, a mild-mannered man who has displayed nothing but appreciation for Greece and its people, felt the need to object to having to watch these two men walk free. “We believe in justice, we believe in law and we accept the sentences,” he said. “But we are disappointed [about the release of Varonos and Hadzioannou]. Doujon didn’t have justice the night they took his life; there was no court, no justice, no jury. We’ve been given a life sentence.”

While Zammit complained about a lack of justice in the northeastern Aegean, another apparent injustice was taking place in the Ionian, where judges decided to throw out an appeal by 21-year-old Andrew Symeou, who was asking to be bailed pending his trial for an alleged attack on fellow British tourist, 18-year-old Jonathon Hiles, in a Zakynthos nightclub in July 2007. Hiles was punched and then hit his head after falling off a dance stage. He died in the hospital two days later.

Symeou, who denies any involvement, has been in custody since last July. Before the end of the year, he was moved to the maximum security Korydallos Prison, where he is being held with convicted criminals. Symeou and his family have consistently challenged the charges against him and highlighted the weaknesses in the case: testimony that suggests someone fitting Symeou’s description could not have committed the crime has been ignored and accusations that some witnesses were coerced by the Zakynthos police have not been followed up.

In fact, the police investigation was completed in four days and a number of key suspects and witnesses, including Symeou, were not questioned. It’s symptomatic of a system that essentially encourages police to identify suspects as quickly as possible and then puts the onus on prosecutors to build a case against them. As far as the police’s statistics are concerned, the Hiles case is now closed, even though Symeou has yet to stand trial.

In the meantime, a university student with no criminal record languishes in a Greek jail unaware as to when he might be able to defend himself. “We have been told to trust the Greek judicial system and to believe that Andrew will receive a fair trial but how can we continue to believe that the system will treat Andrew fairly when so far he has been treated unfairly?” said Frank Symeou, Andrew’s father. “The court has a duty to uphold individuals’ fundamental rights, rights that are afforded to everyone. Andrew has the right to liberty, which includes being granted bail pending trial, unless there are strong reasons not to.”

This is a view shared by the London-based human rights group Fair Trials International, which has helped Symeou file an application with the European Court of Human Rights in the belief that Greece is violating European law by denying Symeou bail. The first two denials were based on the fact that he is not a Greek citizen, while the third rejection came after a council of judges decided he might re-offend.

“The arguments of the Greek judges defy logic,” said Sarah Ludford, a British Liberal Democrat MEP that has taken up Symeou’s cause. “Having denied Andrew bail twice on the discriminatory grounds that he is a foreigner, although he had a temporary family home address in Greece, they are justifying bail refusal by claiming he ‘may commit a crime,’ for which there is absolutely no basis.”

Ludford points out that part of the blame lies with the European Union, as it has failed to attach a list of defense rights to the European arrest warrant, under which Symeou was taken into custody. This may be the case but Greece must then accept the lion’s share of the blame for failing to dispense justice fairly.

You have to wonder, when the average detention time in Greece is 12 months – three times the EU average – how many other cases like this there are. Andrew Symeou can at least rely on a family and legal team that are working tirelessly to draw attention to his treatment and ensure he gets justice. How many others like him do not have a voice at all? We are heading toward having a judicial system where only those who employ big-name lawyers or have the connections to sway malleable judges are in with a chance of winning their case. This isn’t the kind of justice system befitting a developed country.

We should consider the words of a third father, Jonathon Hiles’s dad, Denzil. “My son is dead and I want the man who is accused of doing it to face trial for it,” he said. “If he didn’t do it then he will be found innocent but he’s got to go to court. We have to believe in the Greek justice system. This isn’t a Third World country, it is part of Europe.”

It’s time we did ourselves, as well as those that step onto Greek soil, justice.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 29, 2010.

Sovereign territory

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

“Sovereignty is rather like virginity: You either have it or you don’t,” a wise man told me some years ago. If this is the case, then, in an age when sexual morals are more lax, it seems fitting that there are only few, if any, states that can truly claim to be sovereign.

For the last few decades, a number of transnational factors — capital, migration, environmental degradation, communication, technology and even terrorism — have chipped away at states’ sovereignty. Rather than a case of “wham bam thank you ma’am,” it’s been a series of long, complicated dates that have led to the same, inevitable outcome.

Of course, there are still moments when sovereignty can be lost in a flash — for example, when Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive last Friday transferred operations at the airport in Port-au-Prince to the USA to speed up the earthquake relief effort. The scale of the disaster that hit the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation meant that Bellerive had little choice than to put his faith in the Americans. Nevertheless, handing control of your country’s airport and air space to another state is a landmark moment when one assesses the withering sovereignty of nations.

Greece is inextricably linked to Haiti, as the island state was the first to recognize the Hellenic Republic as an independent country in 1822. But over the past few days, the two countries have had something else in common: Greece also saw its sovereignty vanish, albeit under less horrific circumstances.

While preparing its Stability and Growth Program, which was officially presented to eurozone members on Monday, Greece essentially gave up control of its economy, and therefore its sovereignty. The measures that Athens intends to adopt as part of the four-year economic recovery plan were written here but they were dictated from other European capitals, even though the onus is on Greece to solve the problem on its own. “It would be wrong to presume or let Greece presume that the other countries could solve its problems,” said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of eurozone finance ministers or Eurogroup.

The death stare that Juncker fixed on Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou during Monday’s eurozone meeting was both humiliating and frightening. It was confirmation that Juncker, a career politician who has been at the heart of EU developments for many years, intends to watch the Greek government like a hawk. But he won’t be satisfied with just monitoring Athens’s movements. He’s already shown he’ll test the limits of Greek sovereignty. It was Juncker, rather than Papaconstantinou, who last week got in touch with International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn to discuss whether Greece could use some financial help. “We think IMF assistance to Greece would not be opportune or welcome,” said Juncker after the chat.

“It’s nice of him to let us know,” the Greek minister might have thought. Well, he’d better get used to it because Juncker won a fresh 30-month mandate as the Eurogroup chief on Monday and the 55-year-old is the kind of technocrat who believes Europe’s strength lies in closer integration, a concept that allows little prospect for EU member states to make decisions independently. In a letter circulated to the eurozone finance ministers this week, the Luxembourger said he wants the Eurogroup “to pursue broader economic surveillance” of its 16 members. Greece’s recklessness and untrustworthiness means other countries could soon suffer the ignominy of outside interference in their economies.

Getting its figures right, cutting costs and generating revenues were never Greece’s strengths — but even so, relying on its European friends to prescribe a way out of this mess seems a high price to pay. It’s difficult to know what’s more galling: the fact that Greece’s ministers are being hauled before Juncker and similar EU officials like errant schoolboys or that it’s now been confirmed in black and white, in page after page of reports, that Greeks are truly incapable of exercising their sovereignty.

If we are to take anything positive from this sobering experience it’s the hope that our European partners have a better idea of what to do than we ever did but, more importantly, that we now have a chance to regain trust and rebuild confidence. Although there are many trials and tribulations that come with a loss of sovereignty or virginity, a loss of dignity will always be more painful. But, unlike virginity and possibly sovereignty, dignity can be restored.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 22, 2010.

The judgement of nations

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

If you’re looking for incisive commentary on contemporary developments, the Catholic Church is not the organization you usually turn to. So, when the Pope decides to dedicate part of his regular Sunday blessing to current affairs, there’s every reason to listen carefully.

Alarmed by clashes between immigrants and locals in the southern Italian town of Rosarno that led to more than 70 people being injured and over 1,000 Africans being evacuated, Pope Benedict XVI pleaded for calm and understanding.

“An immigrant is a human being, different only in where he comes from, his culture and his tradition,” he told worshippers. “We have to go to the heart of the problem, of the significance of the human being. The problem is a human one and I invite everyone to look in the face of those nearby and see their soul, their history and their life and say to themselves: This is a man and God loves him as he loves me.”

It was a universal theme for what at first appears to be a very local dispute. Immigrants began rioting after a gang of local youths opened fire on some of them with an air rifle. The UN Refugee Agency believes there has been a rise in the number of migrants looking for work as crop pickers in the underdeveloped region of Calabria because factory jobs in the north of Italy have evaporated due to the economic crisis. The possible involvement of the local mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, also gives the story a distinct Italian flavor.

However, events in Rosarno are actually part of a universal theme and are relevant to many countries, including Greece. Like immigrants elsewhere, those in Rosarno want to work their way to a better life. Like immigrants in so many countries, those in southern Italy live in squalid conditions, work for meagre wages (less than 30 euros a day, some of which has to be paid to middlemen) and are in constant fear of being deported.

You will find identical stories in many parts of Greece. Try Manolada in the Peloponnese for instance, where foreign laborers pick strawberries. Or visit the orange groves around Arta in northwestern Greece, where, as a report in Sunday Kathimerini’s “K” magazine highlighted this week, hundreds of Afghans and Pakistanis are picking fruit for sub-sustenance wages and living in shacks with no electricity or running water.

The disturbing events in Rosarno emphasize the fragility of the situation in Greece, where locals and immigrants in so many places have formed relationships of convenience that could fall apart at any time.

While Greece doodled, Italy drew a hard line on immigration under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government. Policy is in the hands of Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a leading member of the anti-immigration Northern League party. He revealed last week that Italy has forcibly repatriated 40,000 people in the last two years and that only 3,000 immigrants tried to reach Italy last year compared to 30,000 in 2008. A controversial agreement with Libya, which allows Italian authorities to push back boatloads of immigrants to the North African country, has been cited as one of the tools in achieving this drop in illegal immigration.

Greece has no such agreements and faces an influx of migrants that dwarfs Italy’s. For years, governments here did nothing and were complicit in tens of thousands of immigrants gravitating toward the dog-eared margins of Greek society. It’s a tactic – it certainly can’t be called a policy – that has led to immigrants becoming scapegoats for all kinds of problems such as crime, drugs, unemployment and disease.

This abdication of responsibility has made it legitimate for politicians and journalists to express reckless views – a prominent TV presenter recently claimed that one of Greece’s most serious economic problems is street traders not paying tax. Come back financial gurus, corrupt ministers, pencil-pushing bureaucrats, fat-cat bosses, insurance-dodging business owners, defaulting entrepreneurs, tax-fiddling freelancers and no receipt-issuing gas station owners! All is forgiven: You’re not to blame for the economic crisis, it’s those pesky migrants with their bed sheets and knockoff Gucci handbags who are undermining this great nation’s economy.

These absurd opinions become acceptable when a society chooses to leave people on the outside, where they can be easy targets. That’s why PASOK’s intention to grant citizenship to the children of immigrants living here legally is the first step toward putting right so many wrongs. By incorporating people who want to live in your country and contribute to it, you invest in them but you also give them a stake in a common future, which brings responsibilities — such as paying tax and abiding by the law. When people live on the fringes, you are only relying on their good will to conform to your society’s demands. When someone is exploited, mistreated or ignored, good will tends to be in short supply.

That’s why it’s worrying that New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras chose this week to make immigration one of his party’s key political battlegrounds. He wrote to Interior Minister Yiannis Ragousis on Monday to express concern about PASOK’s citizenship plans. According to Samaras, the new law would “make it easier for immigrants to enter Greece illegally so they can have children here and obtain citizenship.” The proposed law, though, only grants citizenship to the children of parents who have been living in Greece legally for five years – hardly a quick fix. Samaras, who studied in the USA in his youth, proposed that the children of immigrants born in Greece should only obtain citizenship when they become adults and after completing at least nine years of studies at Greek schools.

“Greeks are a people, not a population, and what transforms a geographical area into a united country and the local population into a people is its identity,” said Samaras in his letter. This begs the questions of how a country can truly be united when the people who make up more than a tenth of its population are left in limbo and whether Greeks really identify with a policy that sees children who are born here, who speak the language, who go to the country’s schools, who sit in its cafeterias, who work in its stores not being officially recognized until they’re 18.

In Italy, even the former fascist Gianfranco Fini, currently the speaker of parliament’s lower house, has rethought his ideas on immigration. He now proposes that migrants be allowed to vote in local elections, that immigrants’ children born in Italy be awarded citizenship and that the waiting time for adult citizenship be cut.

Samaras claims PASOK is afraid to talk about “Greekness” at a time when other European countries are trying to rediscover their identity. But Fini’s transformation emphasizes how far behind the curve Samaras is – developments in immigration have overtaken politicians such as the ND leader, making the rigid thinking of the past irrelevant. The sheer numbers of people moving between countries and the growing ways in which they’re being exploited means identity is no longer simply found in a passport. At a time when cultures and languages are no longer the defining factors, a country’s identity is derived from its ethos, its values and its principles. Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, once said: “A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” Greece, like Italy, must prepare for that judgment.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 15, 2010.

And now, for my next trick…

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

To many people, the European Union is a fantasyland whose very existence and enduring success defy logic. It’s like an old magic trick that continues to captivate audiences, even though everyone’s seen it many times before. But the EU does what all good tricks do: It encourages onlookers to suspend their disbelief and look at the bigger picture rather than the details.

This unique quality was underlined on January 1, when Spain, a country whose economy is disintegrating, took over the presidency of the 27-nation bloc in the middle of a staggering financial crisis with the promise that it would lead the EU to recovery. The spell which the EU has cast over its audience was highlighted by the fact that hardly anyone batted an eyelid at the incongruousness of this situation.

A number of years ago, a Nigerian general whose army had just invaded another African nation appeared live on the BBC World Service to declare that his soldiers had “brought democracy” to the country in question. “That’s great, will you now bring it to Nigeria as well?” was the sharp response from the radio presenter.

Something similar comes to mind when reading the message posted on the official website of the Spanish EU presidency. The country’s prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero says Spain’s main challenge will be to help Europe build an economy that is “more productive, innovative and sustainable.” But surely if the Spaniards knew how to do that, they would already be applying it to their own economy.

While we in Greece are caught up in our own economic crisis, it’s easy to overlook the dramas being played out in other EU countries, such as Spain. The country’s public deficit for 2009 exceeded 70 billion euros – five times as much as the previous year – to stand at 6.79 percent of gross domestic product. It’s still only about half of Greece’s but nevertheless up 1.2 percent on the 2008 figure.

And like Greece, Spain recently had its credit rating downgraded. Standard and Poor’s lowered the country’s rating from “stable” to “negative” and warned that it faced a prolonged period of sluggish economic growth. But Spain’s most dramatic problem, and an area where even Greece’s disaster of an economy cannot match it yet, is unemployment. The jobless rate stood at almost 20 percent at the end of last year, which is the second-highest in the EU after Latvia. Incredibly for Europe’s fifth-largest economy, unemployment among Spaniards aged 16-24 has reached 42 percent.

All this makes Spain’s task of providing leadership on economic recovery seem far beyond its capability, while its promises of guiding the EU onto the path of financial security ring hollow. Zapatero’s announcement on December 30 that he was introducing a package of measures to help ailing farmers in his own country will have been of interest to our prime minister, George Papandreou — who faces the threat of farmers blocking highways this month — but is unlikely to have convinced Europe’s economic giants that Spain has creative answers to the Union’s economic dilemmas.

In fact, Spain’s challenge is even more complex than it first appears. During its presidency, the Union needs to agree on a replacement for the bloc’s long-term growth strategy, known as the Lisbon Agenda. The plan was meant have made the EU the world’s most competitive economy by this year. It has patently failed and a new 10-year plan, known as the 2020 strategy, is likely to be adopted at an EU leaders’ summit in March.

Before then, on February 11, the EU will hold a special summit on the economy, when Greece’s crisis and the danger it poses to the euro will be at the forefront of discussions. It’s then that Zapatero and his government will truly be tested, since, beyond having to solve economic riddles at a time of extreme turbulence, Spain will have to deal with an institutional conundrum as well. Its presidency is the first since the Lisbon Treaty took effect last month, creating the posts of President of the European Council, which has gone to former Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, and Foreign Policy Chief, which is being filled by British politician Catherine Ashton.

Normally, Zapatero, who is experiencing his toughest year since taking office in 2004, would be looking forward to taking over the EU presidency, as it gives him the opportunity to boost his plummeting popularity at home and cultivate his image of being Europe’s Barack Obama – a title several of his EU colleagues, including Papandreou, have staked a claim to. But the fact that he and his foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, now have to tread a fine line between asserting Spain’s will on the EU and conceding ground to Van Rompuy and Ashton, means the Iberians could lose more than they will gain over the next six months.

Moratinos has pledged that Spain will fulfil its role with “modesty and discretion” but it already appears that Madrid is determined to shape events over the next six months according to its aims and needs. For instance, the Zapatero government has already organized seven summits between the EU and international partners, most of which have a clear relevance to Spanish interests: North Africa (Morocco on March 7-8 and Egypt on June 5), Central and South America (Mexico on May 15-16 and Latin American and Caribbean countries May 18-19) and with Mediterranean countries on June 7.

By using its unique position in the world to bridge the gap between Europe and other regions, Spain is in a sense augmenting the rotating presidency and underlining the value of having different member states set the EU agenda. However, the new institutional setup means Madrid may have set itself on a collision course with the EU’s supremos.

Although Van Rompuy is meant to represent the EU in international meetings at head-of-state or government level, all the summits mentioned earlier will be held in Spain, so Zapatero will undoubtedly want to play a significant role. Likewise, Moratinos has organized an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Cordoba on March 5-6 even though foreign policy is now Ashton’s responsibility.

Furthermore, despite the introduction of an EU president and foreign policy chief, the country holding the rotating presidency still retains significant influence: It continues to chair the weekly meetings of EU ambassadors, when the groundwork for many policies is carried out, and it presides over many committees that prepare Union initiatives in a range of fields.

If the EU magic trick is to continue wowing audiences and not to be exposed as a cheap stunt, Zapatero will need to display immense skill to ensure that Spain’s role dovetails with those of Van Rompuy and Ashton. Managing this while also reviving his country’s economy and getting 27 member states to agree on a common strategy for future growth requires a sleight of hand that seems too incredible even for the fantastic world of the European Union.

This commentary was written by Nick Malkoutzis and first appeared in Athens Plus on January 8, 2010.