GREEK HELSINKI MONITOR
MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP - GREECE

P.O. Box 60820, GR-15304 Glyka Nera, Greece
Tel. +30-1-347.22.59; Fax +30-1-601.87.60
e-mail: office@greekhelsinki.gr
Balkan Human Rights Web Pages: http://www.greekhelsinki.gr
Balkan Human Rights List: http://www.egroups.com/group/balkanhr/fullinfo.html
Greek Human Rights List: http://www.egroups.com/group/greekhr/fullinfo.html

(Report Distributed to the OSCE Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Human Rights and Inhuman Treatment or Punishment, Vienna 27 March 2000)

23 March 2000

Introduction

Greece is not immune from the worldwide tendency of law enforcement officials frequently abusing the rights of citizens during arrests, interrogations, detention or imprisonment. Such attitude is facilitated by the practice of court authorities to rarely prosecute such criminal behavior. When they do so, cases reach the court many years after the facts. This happens even in cases backed with forensic evidence. Occasionally, compellingly incriminating evidence in addition to forensic certificates is ignored by the courts, which end up acquitting police officers. The latter may stay in the force during all these years of investigation and court procedures, thus still able to exert undue influence on those who dare prosecuting them. Such practices discourage many victims of police violence to file charges against policemen. Finally, many police stations have either inadequate or overcrowded facilities: as a result, detainees are treated in a degrading way. Some recent examples are provided below. Competent state authorities do not appear very sensitive to such allegations; hence little progress has being made recently.

Police Violence Against Minors

Perhaps one of the most characteristic cases of police violence, including torture, that can remain without any consequences for the perpetrators of such acts is the case of two minors, aged 14 (initials: P.T.) and 16 (D.A.). In 19 August 1994, they were arrested and brought to the police station of Kassandreia, Halkidiki (Northern Greece), as suspects for the theft of 460,000 drs. (around $2,000 at the time) from their employers. During their interrogation, three police officers, separately or jointly and for more than an hour, were beating the two minors with their hands, feet, truncheons, and shafts. They even took off the pants of one minor and obliged him to bend and shout “I am a fag,” while threatening him that they will force one shaft into his behind and submit him to electroshock. All this, so as to extort confessions from them. In the end, it turned out they were wrongly suspected in first place and were set free. A forensic report verified the injuries and the probable causes. The previous acts were thus described in the 1263/1998 judgment of the Three-Member Misdemeanor Court of Halikidki, which convicted the three policemen for torture (article 137A of the Penal Code) and sentenced them to 4 years in prison each and 5 years deprivation of their civil rights. Despite the gravity of the action, though, the three policemen were set free on appeal. Worse, they were not even suspended from the police force. On 3 March 2000, the Three-Member Appeals Court of Salonica … acquitted the three policemen from these charges, arguing that the incidents of torture were “exaggerated by the minors” and the injuries were caused by their employers, before the minors were brought to the police station. The prosecutor, who had asked for the policemen’s conviction, subsequently filed to the Supreme Court for the cassation of the court’s decision.

Police Violence Against Roma

Amidst repeated allegations of excessive police violence against Roma in recent years, the murder of one Rom and torture of two others in 1998, backed by forensic evidence, led to no disciplinary measures against the police officers involved: officers indicted in 1998 for homicide or torture have remained in office and the proceedings continued as of this writing. This happened despite court indictments. The ministry simply launched an inconclusive “sworn administrative investigation.”

• In April 1998, Angelos Celal, a 28-year-old Rom, was killed by police officers in Partheni (near Salonica), while trying to escape police control. The forensic report certified that Celal died of a head wound caused by a bullet shot in the back of his head. In addition, he had another wound in the back. In June, the prosecutor informed the police that he had indicted three police officers for murder, conspiracy to commit murder and other charges. The police officers were not suspended. The case has yet to reach the courts.

• In May 1998, Lazaros Bekos and Eleftherios Kotropoulos (17 and 18 years old respectively) were ill-treated by police officers during their detention at the police station in the town of Mesolongi. According to a forensic certificate, they had “medium bodily injuries, inflicted with a broken instrument.” In July 1998, the two Roma pressed charges against the police and, in December, three officers were indicted for violation of article 137A of the criminal code on “torture and other offenses against human dignity.” Specifically, they were accused of having violated paragraph 3, section 1, for “concurrent bodily harm caused by a person, whose duties are the investigation of possible criminal acts, with the intent to extort from another person under his authority a confession, a deposition or an information.” Throughout 1998 and again in 1999, the Roma youth were harassed by these police officers to retract their statements. Even after their indictment, the three police officers were neither transferred nor suspended from duty. The case has yet to reach the courts.

• On 12 September 1999, Nikos Katsaris, a 23-year-old Rom living in the Chalandri camp, was in a car heading towards Nafplio with his father, his underage brother and a cousin. On this Sunday, they wanted have a look at three open-air markets, without having to deal with the sellers immediately. All three open-air markets were surrounded by barbed wire. When leaving the third market, three police officers stopped the Roma and, at gunpoint, told them to get out of the car, and put their hand ups. The officer did a body search - swearing, kicking and beating them. The Roma claimed that they had only come to look at cars to buy, and not to steal, as the police suspected. To prove this, they even showed the officers the notes with names and mobile phones of the owners of the cars to prove their intention to buy a car. Nevertheless, they were taken to the police station and kept in two separate cells with ten other people, mostly immigrants awaiting deportation. They were detained because the police found court decisions against Nikos Katsaris and his father involving as yet unpaid fines. The two underage youths were released the same day while Nikos Katsaris and his father were only released after their relatives paid the bail the next day. On 27 October, Nikos Katsaris, with the help of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, pressed charges against the policemen involved and subsequently filed a complaint to the Ombudsman’s office. The police did not even deem the case worth of a “sworn administrative investigation,” stating that an internal review in that police station showed that none of the allegations were well founded.

Police Violence Against Asylum Seekers and Immigrants

In recent years, some 500-700,000 immigrants have settled in Greece, mostly illegally; two-thirds of them are Albanians, and most belong to minority religions, but no official figures are available. In 1998, a legalization procedure for those immigrants was launched, eventually involving some 230,000 people applying for residence permits. Only some 35,000 had been granted permits by the end of 1999. Migrants are subjected to frequent “sweeping operations” aiming at the summary expulsion of all those without any legal documents. Frequent allegations that migrants are subjected to degrading and humiliating, sometimes violent, treatment by policemen during these operations are routinely rejected without any investigation by state authorities.

• The best-known recent example happened on 3 July 1999. All foreigners found in the streets were rounded up by the police and, even if holders of legal residence documents, taken to police stations or open-air stadiums and had their fingerprints taken for possible match against pending criminal cases. Illegal immigrants were expelled from the country, with TV crews filming the operation. Over 300 intellectuals signed a protest petition, but only the outcry of the Greek farmers, worried about their crops in the absence of cheap foreign labor force, persuaded the government to return to stop mass expulsions. Similar, less publicized “sweeping operations” recurrently took place throughout 1999.

Conditions in Prisons and Detention Facilities and Prisoners’ Rights

On 20 August 1999, the Ombudsman carried out an “autopsy” in the detention facilities of the [Athens Center] Omonoia Square Police Station, following citizens’ complaints. In a letter to the Minister of Public Order (7905/99/2.3-27-8-1999), the Ombudsman stated that the facility was overcrowded: between 55-115 detainees in premises with an –otherwise inadequate- infrastructure for just 30 detainees. One consequence was that minors and adults were kept together, against the law. Another, in conjunction with the lack of light and air, that they were all forced to wear only their underwear, given the heat, “in violation of the respect to their dignity.” The only two toilets’ cleanliness was “unacceptable to say the least.” Most detainees had skin and infectious diseases that were not at all or inadequately treated by doctors. The most serious problem, noted the Ombudsman, was the lengthy (sometimes up to six months) detention of foreigners awaiting expulsion, which “informally transforms their places of detention into prisons, without any prior indictment of these inmates.” “In combination with the prevailing appalling material conditions, that detention could be considered de facto ‘inhuman and degrading treatment.’” Noting that the use of the term “sweeping operations” [see above] is “very offending for human dignity,” the Ombudsman recommended that, when there are no adequate facilities, no such operations leading to mass detention of foreigners be carried out. He added that foreigners who cannot be expelled immediately [for lack of country ready to accept them] be granted temporary permission to stay in the country and be set free. Following this report, short-lived improvements were noticed in that police station. Nevertheless, these conditions prevail throughout the country wherever detention centers are inadequately equipped and/or overcrowded.

Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece, in anticipation of the presentation and distribution of this report to the OSCE Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Human Rights and Inhuman Treatment or Punishment, have submitted a complimentary copy to the Greek Foreign Ministry on 23 March 2000.