Journalists against SLAPPs

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Dear Member,

This is our weekly round-up from Greece.

Journalists and media outlets who revealed the “Greek Watergate” appeared in the court hearing this week amidst a wave of solidarity. The lawsuit, widely deemed as SLAPP, came from PM’s nephew Dimitriades, his chief of staff when the scandal broke out. Dimitriades did not appear in court.

The mother of a Tempi train accident victim testified in the relevant Parliamentary Committee and spoke the truth to power. You would hardly find her testimony in Greek mainstream media. A day after, Politico revealed that the ND government dismissed a call from the European public prosecutor to take action over the potential criminal liability of two former transport ministers after the deadly train collision.

In a landmark ruling, the European Court for Human Rights condemned Greece for identifying HIV-positive drug addicts accused of being illegal sex workers. Five of these women are long dead. Justice came late.

Dimitriades is nowhere to be found in the court hearing for his SLAPP

Thursday was a big day. Journalists and media outlets who revealed the scandal dubbed as the “Greek Watergate” that rocked the ruling ND party have appeared in court on defamation charges.

The Greek media outlets Efimerida ton Syntakton, Reporters United and their reporters Nikolas Leontopoulos and Thodoris Chondrogiannos, involved in revealing the wiretapping scandal, and journalist Thanasis Koukakis, who the illegal spyware Predator wiretapped, testified over a lawsuit filed by Grigoris Dimitriadis.

The lawsuit came after media revelations that the phones of politicians, businessmen, and media figures were being tapped. Dimitriades is the nephew of PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who, as his chief of staff, had been in charge of the country’s secret service.

“In a move described as “disgraceful” by press freedom groups, Grigoris Dimitriadis launched the legal action a day before being fired after the spyware scandal came to light in August 2022,” the Guardian reported (Opens in a new window).

Dimitriadis, who did not appear in court, has demanded €550,000 (£426,000) in damages and the withdrawal of media coverage implicating him in the scandal. The defendants deny the charge.

Journalists and citizens had gathered in solidarity outside the Athens court of first instance on Thursday. In his testimony before the court, constitutional law expert Nikos Alivizatos emphasized the case’s significance for the rule of law.

The International Press Institute (IPI) and other organizations called the legal action “a startling example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp), and an attempt to muzzle investigative reporting on a matter of significant public interest.” Before Thursday’s hearing, the IPI called on Dimitriadis to drop the case (Opens in a new window), emphasizing that he had filed two other lawsuits, including a second legal action against the same plaintiffs. In that lawsuit, launched two months ago, he claimed damages of 3.3 million euros and also demanded that reports of his alleged links to the spy scandal be removed.

Nine international media organizations have condemned (Opens in a new window) Dimitriadis’s lawsuit as bearing no ground.

A decision is expected from four months up to two years.

A Grieving Mother testifies on Tempi train accident - and shakes Greece

Mother Maria Karystianou, who lost her daughter Marthi Psaropoulou at the Tempi train accident on 28 February 2023, testified at the Parliamentary Committee tasked with investigating the accident.

Karystianou, a doctor, now heads the Tempi Train Tragedy Victims’ Association.

“You might see me here alone, but next to me stand 57 dead and 180 injured people,” she said.

She added she does not testify in front of a court, as she would have expected, but in front of a Parliamentary Committee, which would decide whether the ministers responsible will be referred to Justice.

“With all due respect, you are not judges, and you cannot know the case’s file, which is already huge…”

“Regulation breaches and omissions are so blatant they did not need a Parliamentary Committee to assess,” Karystianou claimed. They should have been “thrown in jail in the first ten days. Instead, we are here a year later to look into whether there are responsibilities,” she added, emphasizing that in this “state crime” in which 57 people lost their lives, “attributing blame is a dead end, I hope this would be achieved through justice…”

She then referred to the parliamentary immunity of Kostas Karamanlis, the Transportation minister when the accident happened.

“You retain this immunity. He is your colleague, yet you cannot support evil. How would it seem if I [as a doctor] would support a doctor who harmed your child?... Does the law apply differently to citizens and ministers? What’s happening in this state?”

Karystianou also wondered whether the Committee is not interested in the “voluminous and full” research of the Europeans, which concluded there are heavy charges and hints for political responsibilities.

They say in surprise that

“on the one hand, there was money spent for allegedly upgrading and improving the operation [of the railway] and on the other hand experts’ reports talking about full lack of safety systems, for non suitable carriages, not new of course, but those that the Swiss threw away as non suitable, for breakdowns happening every day and poorly maintained rails… and many more that if we knew about we would not allow our people to travel by train.”

She also referred to the destroyed tele-administration in Larissa, which was put back in place six months after the railway started operating again and which cost, as Karystianou said, 200,000 euros - while cementing the accident area cost 650,000 and was approved within 15 days. The victim’s mother said characteristically that the area was thus altered, with valuable evidence lost as a result. She testified that judicial officials who were investigating the accident had not visited the area. “I believe something was illicitly transported. That’s why the accident area was altered,” she claimed, talking about gaps in the investigation, for example, what was the commercial train that crashed into the passenger train carrying (there has been a hint the train was carrying a substance used to corrupt fuel).

A day after the grieving mother testified, Politico published a report (Opens in a new window) revealing:

“Greece’s government dismissed a call from the European public prosecutor to take action over the potential criminal liability of two former transport ministers after a deadly train collision that convulsed the country last February.”

The report added that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office

“considers the Greek constitutional quirk —that only parliament can pursue action against ministers— to contravene EU law and has raised the impasse with the European Commission.”

Landmark ruling against Greece from the European Court for Human Rights

It has been one of the most hideous incidents during the crisis years. It was when then Health Minister Andreas Loverdos and then Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoides, members of the interim government led by Lucas Papademos, announced (Opens in a new window) a month before the May 2012 elections that they were bringing in a new measure supposedly to protect public health from HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C. The law was inspired by a coercive 1940 law on public health.

What followed was a massive police operation (Opens in a new window) in downtown, Athens during which 96 women drug addicts were forcibly brought to the police station where they were coercively subjected to medical tests. Twenty-nine of them were found HIV positive.

Instead of referring these women for treatment, the authorities accused them of being non-registered sex workers and used the results to apply felony charges (Opens in a new window).

Photos of these women (taken in the police station) along with their details -full name, birthplace, address, etc.- were distributed to the media (Opens in a new window), which then stigmatized these women by presenting them as a public health risk. Andreas Loverdos had pleaded (Opens in a new window) in a Press Conference that journalists should not let the results of the coercive test go unnoticed.

Two of these women, Katerina and Maria, are now dead (Opens in a new window). Katerina committed suicide in 2014, and Maria, who was also the mother of a child, died in 2016 when she was 32. In total, five of these women have since died (Opens in a new window).

In the following years, those of these women who took their case to the courts were acquitted (Opens in a new window) from all charges - that is, charges of prostitution and grievous bodily injury (that is, that they were working as prostitutes while knowing that they were HIV positive).

The coercive provision was abolished (Opens in a new window) by Fotini Skopoulis after he became deputy minister of health but was reinstated when Adonis Georgiadis became minister of health. However, it was abolished again by Panagiotis Kouroumplis, minister of health in the SYRIZA-ANEL government, which was in power from 2015-19.

It was just now, on 24 January 2024, twelve years later, that the European Court of Human Rights ruled (Opens in a new window) Greece violated the right to private life by publicizing the identities and medical data of sex workers diagnosed with HIV.

The court ruled (Opens in a new window) that Greece must pay a total of 70,000 euros in damages after HIV-positive women’s personal and medical data was made public.

Eleven women accused (Opens in a new window) Greece of forcing them to undergo a blood test without their consent and of publishing their surnames, photographs, and medical data on the police internet site and in the media.

Ten of the applicants were Greek sex workers (Opens in a new window) who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. The other applicant was the sister of one of the women. Her photograph and surname were broadcast on the main evening news program instead of those of her sister, a sex worker who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

It is worth noting that Chrisochoides is now again Citizen Protection minister. He was then claiming that publicizing those women’s data was absolutely legal. (Opens in a new window) Andreas Loverdos continues his political career, but was not elected an MP in the last elections.

It is also worth remembering what Maria's (the HIV-positive woman who died) mother wrot (Opens in a new window)e when her child died:

“This is done now and Mr Loverdos can sleep in peace. Society is almost purified by these girls and he took care of it.
They ridiculed my child, they came into the village, and KEELPNO tested my grandchild in the school; they exposed us, and they humiliated us.
They took the girls to the basement of Section C of Korydallos prison instead of treating them in the hospital. They were throwing food to them through the bars while they [the girls] were at the same time swallowing batteries.
They humiliated us in public, and now I repay [them] in public, shortly before I bury my daughter, [saying] Andreas Loverdos can now sleep in peace.”