Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

The medieval remnant of pre-trial detention is considered an “institution” and is used under the pretext that, through the brutal deprivation of liberty,

  • (a) the accused will be compelled to take part in the investigation without putting obstacles in its way,
  • (b) he will be forced to appear before the criminal court if he is referred to trial and
  • (c) he will ultimately suffer the sentence, as a rule annihilating and inhuman, that may be imposed on him.

Lawyers describe pre-trial detention as a means of procedural coercion, that is, as a “method” that compels the accused citizen to undergo the above.

Certain prosecutors, judges and other lawyers, who believe that through their statements, initiatives, reactions and acts they are supposedly protecting society from crime, claim that the pre-trial detention of the accused is allegedly “necessary” so that he will not “disappear”. So that he may undergo the prosecution and, ultimately, be convicted for his unlawful acts, indeed for those criminal acts that affect society as a whole and offend the public interest. The “public interest”, as each person understands it.

Thus, after a few escapes to “abroad”, which is no longer so abroad but an extension of the “inside” after the substantive unification of the territories of the Member States of the European Union, by certain accused persons, such as the disgraced director of “Siemens” in Greece and a picturesque football official, the majority of prosecutors and investigating judges decide on pre-trial detention of accused persons so that they will not be accused of “letting them off” or being “influenced” by them. In short, so that they will not “get mixed up in trouble”! After all, before each person’s personal calm, the pursuit of nirvana, what importance do the principles of law, true justice, leniency, humanity and civilization have? Absolutely none! Everything in our age must serve the ego, our egocentric and narrow-minded interests, and let the earth be mixed with fire...

According to the third-world mentality prevailing in our little state, everyone is considered suspect of fraud, favour-granting acts, services rendered, in our official Ottoman language: patronage favours, and influence until the opposite is proven.

Thus, if an enlightened prosecutorial or judicial officer, faithful to the oath he gave to serve real Justice, rules, in accordance with the law and individual rights, such as the presumption of innocence of every accused person, in favour of the liberty of an accused person known to the public through the mass media, then he receives attacks from every direction: from the Ministry of Justice and the minister of the day with his extremely democratic convictions, from the judicial inspectorate, from the mass media, from the government and the opposition, as well as from every other competent and incompetent person.

The result of this caveman mentality is that prisons fill with a multitude of convicts without trial and newspaper front pages fill with banner headlines announcing triumphantly, with overflowing satisfaction, the pre-trial detention of this or that major banker for fraud, the former defence minister for money laundering, the major contractor for tax theft, the fashion designer for debts to the state, an actor for involvement in narcotics, the neighbourhood priest for entering prohibited sites with his personal computer, and so on.

Alongside the information supplied to the insatiable public about the pre-trial detentions of personalities who have lost their power and, above all, their financial strength, while the financially powerful are not touched and are considered sacred persons enjoying perpetual immunity, we learn that the same fate befalls their spouses, their young or older children and many close relatives. All follow the path to prison as a means of procedural coercion, with observance of the principles of supposed “civilization”, which for these occasions is also called “legal civilization”, as well as the principle of collective responsibility, for whose support the nonsense about the formation of a “criminal organization” is mobilized, consisting, for example, of the accused husband, the housewife wife, the student daughter and the younger son!

And why was businessman Tadopoulos placed in pre-trial detention? Because he faces felony charges for forming a criminal organization, fraud, embezzlement against the state and laundering black money. Fine. Very well. Since he faces such charges, they did well to put him in prison.

There is, however, one objection. Insignificant for our uncultivated society: the person imprisoned by the decision of two, as a rule easily influenced, persons, a prosecutor and an investigating judge, did not go through trial. He was not tried. Then by what right did they deprive him of his liberty? Answer: he was placed in pre-trial detention, temporarily detained, that is, for about two years, because that is how we two judged it. We decide and order, and whoever likes it may accept it. We are infallible. We hear nothing and no one can touch us. We have experience, knowledge, authentic knowledge, and at the same time we possess state force. Power. Our own power...

Of course, the law and the Constitution provide that, in order to deprive someone of liberty by way of exception, you must explain analytically, persuasively, objectively, with specific and “thorough” reasoning, that this extreme and exceptional measure of pre-trial detention had to be applied and not some milder measure used by most European, and not only European, countries, such as monetary guarantee, prohibition on leaving the country, frequent appearance at a police station, and so on. To this observation you receive no answer. You receive contempt, mockery and malicious irony, even formulated in the texts of judicial decisions, mainly the so-called “council orders”.

Pre-trial detentions constitute the rule. Many people are publicly humiliated, unjustly imprisoned and destroyed; and in the very few cases in which they themselves manage, through toil, struggles, sacrifices and the consumption of their entire property, to be saved from the mechanisms of destruction, they have lost their whole life in investigating offices, in prisons and on the benches of courts and, along with it, their faith and principles. They have been transformed into beasts with hatred for everyone and everything and with permanent, incurable mental suffering. And this appears to be what the mentality in favour of pre-trial detentions seeks; it will not change in the foreseeable future, because such a change presupposes that society and the people themselves must change. They must become different by climbing the ladder of civilization, which we have permanently abandoned. We preferred to remain followers of darkness, and it is a pity that we took nothing from the sunlit country in which we found ourselves, nor from the lessons of its history.