No journalist is jailed in Greece.

This statement is in response to statements made by NGOs, under this agenda item, about Greece.

Accusations against Greece about the treatment of journalists are based only on theoretical constructions and do not take into account reality.

It is true that on paper journalists are sometimes sentenced to prison for offences which in other countries are dealt with in civil procedures. As a matter of fact, though, most journalists receiving jail terms in first instance for offences committed through the media usually end up being acquitted on appeal. In the very few cases in which jail terms are maintained even on appeal they can easily be bought off for usually very small amounts of money. The end result is that the penalties actually imposed by courts in Greece for offences committed through the media are much smaller than those incurred in other countries for the same offences. To put it bluntly, it costs much less –and not only in terms of money-- to commit offences through the media in Greece than in other countries. A modus vivendi has developed in practice that leaves everybody involved happy: journalists, publishers, politicians, public figures …

It is outrageous that Greece should be mentioned at all in the context of restrictions on the freedom of the press. For anybody who has any knowledge of the reality in Greece it is totally outrageous that the name of Greece should be heard along with the names of countries that are notorious for the prosecution, the persecution, the jailing, the murder, the disappearance of journalists. To consider the plight of those journalists as comparable to the situation of journalists in Greece is an insult added to the injuries suffered by those journalists.

No journalist is in jail in Greece. No journalist fears jail in Greece. No journalist works or lives in fear in Greece because of his or her professional activities.

Legislation in Greece concerning defamation is not stricter than in other European countries.

One NGO referred to specific cases of alleged mistreatment of journalists in Greece. On that, I would like to say the following: We respect and welcome the work carried out by NGOs in Greece. We consider their role an important, indeed essential, element for the proper functioning of democracy. We respect their decision to bring up specific cases to this forum. However, it looks like there is a misunderstanding here: this forum is not one more instance in the judicial procedure specific cases have to go through in Greece, and should not be treated as such.

Incidents comparable to those happening everywhere in the world are reported here in minute detail as if this were a form of appeals court or Supreme Court. I would ask participants, the next time they are faced with such detailed accounts of this or that incident in a remote municipality in Greece, to listen to the account carefully and judge for themselves the severity of each case and the seriousness of each allegation. I say this because sometimes people do not hear the details, and the only impression that remains is that this or that country has been mentioned in a negative way.

I must make it clear that I do not claim that the positions expressed by the NGOs on the specifics of each case are wrong. This is not the point. The point is that this is not the proper forum to discuss individual cases unless somebody’s life or physical well-being is in danger. For every case of verbal “harassment” – with or without quotation marks — reported as occurring in Greece, there are dozens of instances of physical torture or murder of journalists in other countries that go unreported.

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