Court verdict on Greece’s Golden Dawn party sends ‘message’ to violent groups

Jennifer Venis, IBA Multimedia JournalistThursday 10 December 2020

But Panagiotis Drakopoulos, Corporate Counsel Forum Liaison Officer of the IBA European Regional Forum and Founder of Drakopoulos Law Firm, based in Athens, says ‘the very extremeness of Golden Dawn’s criminality, which also has neo-Nazi ideological foundations, something not encountered in typical far-right populist parties in other European countries, makes this case unique’.

Golden Dawn’s members are said to have run militias, targeting leftists, anti-nationalists, communist trade unionists, LGBTI peoples, migrants and refugees. The party’s leadership included Holocaust deniers and Hitler sympathisers.

Seven of Golden Dawn’s 18 former MPs, including its founder Nikolaos Michaloliakos, were convicted of running the criminal organisation, while others were found culpable of participation. In total 68 people faced charges, including Golden Dawn member Giorgos Roupakias, who was convicted of the murder of campaigner and musician Pavlos Fyssas in 2013 and given a life sentence. A member of the prosecution called this the biggest trial of fascists since the Nuremberg trials.

Riccardo Lucev is the Website Officer for the IBA Criminal Law Committee and a specialist criminal lawyer at Cagnola & Associati in Milan. He says that from a technical and procedural standpoint of criminal law, the trial does not set an international precedent. However, he believes that, from a cultural standpoint, the verdict can be ‘a message to any kind of violent group around the world, reminding them that no civilised jurisdiction is available to tolerate violence in any way’.

But the violence of Golden Dawn, which was well-known for years, was legitimised when Golden Dawn were handed 18 parliamentary seats in the general elections of 2012, which followed Greece’s severe economic crises.

Emboldened, members increased attacks. According to Greece’s Racist Violence Recording Network, there were 154 cases of racist attacks in 2012, including the murder of two immigrants, with a number of incidents attributed to Golden Dawn members.

Critics allege that police officers failed to appropriately respond to these crimes and argue that Golden Dawn’s attacks were often ignored because they predominantly targeted immigrants.

Drakopoulos tells Global Insight that the Greek authorities delayed in addressing Golden Dawn members’ violence effectively. ‘Two factors contributed to this’, he says. ‘First that Golden Dawn was a political party and Greek law does not provide for a procedure to ban political parties, and second that Greek criminal law does not provide for deterrent sentences in cases of misdemeanours’.

He adds that the delay ended when violence linked to Golden Dawn peaked in three incidents that qualified as felonies, including beatings of Egyptian fishermen and trade unionists in 2012 and 2013 respectively, which qualified as attempted murder, and finally the 2013 murder of Pavlos Fyssas.

The investigation into Golden Dawn’s criminality began alongside that into Fyssas’ murder in 2013. The group’s founder, Michaloliakos, had previously accepted political responsibility for the murder, but denied criminal responsibility. In court, Michaloliakos declared ‘I would like to make clear that, for the first time in our history, since the founding of the Greek state, a party leader faces trial for the actions of a party member’.

In the end, Golden Dawn’s own anti-democratic vision of autocracy contributed to accountability for its crimes. Reportedly, Golden Dawn’s founding charter enshrines the ‘leader principle’, used by the Nazis to describe a system where leaders have absolute authority, and this document was used to link Michaloliakos to the actions of party members.

Michaloliakos had also complained that Golden Dawn faced political persecution for its ideas. Freedom of expression has important limits, however. ‘Freedom of speech and freedom of thought cannot embrace an idea that aims at destroying them’, Lucev says.

For Lucev, the problem with accountability arises when violence remains unexpressed, becoming more of a menace to a social group, with the result that even violence against objects might become intimidating. ‘We need to understand that a lower standard of violence should be considered [in law]’, he says. ‘Verbal violence (or violence against property), as well as incitement to hate, can send messages to the population, awakening the worst – and potentially criminal – intentions’.

Far-right political parties are far from dead around the world, Lucev notes. ‘On the contrary, we are seeing in many countries, and Italy is one of them, a sort of rebirth of this kind of political organisation’.

He adds that tackling the violence of far-right extremism at court is too late, ‘because, at that point, a crime has already been committed’. Instead, he believes we should start fighting ideologies of hate before they become criminal, when they are just ideas.

‘This requires addressing and solving the social and economic problems that are the trigger for frustration, anger and violence in the minds of some people’, he says.

Image: yiannisscheidt / Shutterstock.com