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

By decision 1480/2010 of the Five-Member Court of Appeal of Athens for felonies, a foreign minor, a Pakistani national, was convicted as if he were an adult and sentenced to imprisonment for four years, four months and twenty-five days. The judgment accepted that the convicted person, together with four others, one Iraqi, two Afghans and one compatriot, acting jointly, after a common decision and through more than one act, committed several offences. In particular,

  • (a) they provided shelter for concealment to a total of ninety-six foreign nationals who, knowing that they had entered the country through the Greek-Turkish border without the lawful formalities, were promoted by them into the interior of the country and were given shelter for concealment in an abandoned warehouse in the Drosopigi area of Kapandriti, Attica. The court held that this act was committed professionally, because its repeated commission under a plan and through the creation of suitable infrastructure, namely a group and a fixed shelter, showed a purpose of obtaining income; and
  • (b) during the two-month period before their arrest on 18.12.2005, on a date not precisely established, all the defendants entered Greek territory without the lawful formalities.

In order to convict the foreign minor as an adult, the appellate criminal court, by majority, three judges to two, rejected the official documents that the convicted person submitted in lawful translation from Urdu into Greek. By that decision, the Court of Appeal did not accept as valid and true the public documents of the state of Pakistan; in other words, it held that both the official birth certificate and the equally official school certificate, from which the interruption of the studies of the convicted minor appeared, were false. With those documents, combined with the testimony of four witnesses, three Pakistanis living in Greece and one Greek woman, the foreign national proved his true age. Yet his status as a homeless foreign national, a Pakistani irregular migrant, mainly influenced the judgment of the criminal court, which authoritatively held that it had not been proved that, at the time when the Pakistani was alleged to have committed the acts charged, he was criminally a minor and that, consequently, another court, namely only the juvenile court, had exclusive jurisdiction to try him. It should be noted that, under the provisions in force, a minor may not be tried by the ordinary courts. His trial must take place exclusively before the competent juvenile courts, so that he is not subjected to the adverse effect of publicity, which is not permitted in juvenile courts, so that he does not sit on the same bench, in the dock, with his adult co-participants and thus is not in some way equated with them and marked with the stigma of the offender, and also so that he does not experience a procedure that will traumatize him and probably obstruct his proper coming of age. See page 9 of the decision: trying the minor's case together with adults would contribute to his premature and distorted maturation. The interesting reasoning of the majority of the criminal court of appeal, by which the minor was treated as an adult, includes the following thoughts: according to the documents produced by the defendant's counsel and read as above, namely (a) a copy of a birth certificate and (b) a school leaving certificate, in the original and in lawful translation, the person named in them with the defendant's details was born in Randhir, Pakistan, on 15.09.1988. Those details of the named person coincide with the corresponding details of the defendant, but the documents do not also record the name of this defendant's mother, which is Manzor. Therefore, these documents do not prove that the person said to have been born on 15.09.1988 is the fourth defendant. It should be noted that, in countries such as Pakistan, because of religion, a woman is not equal to a man and does not have equal rights with him. The downgrading of the role of women in Muslim societies is common knowledge. After that, the decision explains that the same defendant, when examined through an interpreter immediately after his arrest and asked about the matter, answered, among other things, that he was born in 1984, according to the defendant examination report with interpreter dated 18.12.2005. He also stated the same, and more specifically that he was born on 01.01.1984, during his examination before the investigating judge on 19.12.2005, again through an interpreter. During the hearing of the case before the first-instance court, where he appeared with defence counsel of his own choice, he said nothing about his age and, in particular, did not say that he had not been born in 1984 as had been stated, indeed by his own declaration, until then. From the above, according to the majority opinion of the court, it is proved that the defendant was born on 01.01.1984 and not on 15.09.1988, as he belatedly and for the first time before the present court claimed. The relevant testimony of the four witnesses examined above is not convincing, especially in view of the aforementioned statements of the defendant and the unclear picture that those witnesses have as to the defendant's date of birth, as emerges from their testimony. Therefore, the fourth defendant's claim that at the time of the acts, on 18.12.2005 and during the two months before that date, he was a minor because he had been born on 15.09.1988 and that, consequently, he had been tried without subject-matter jurisdiction by the first-instance Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of Athens, since he fell within the jurisdiction of the juvenile courts, is unfounded and must be rejected according to the above majority opinion of the members of the court. Thus, once again, doubt was interpreted against this particular defendant because of his aforementioned inability to defend himself effectively. As regards the defendant's statement through an interpreter referred to in the appellate conviction, the lack of strict observance of the applicable provisions on interpreters is well known. Thus, the role of interpreter was played by a person originating from Bangladesh and not from Pakistan, because the two countries are confused and their linguistic difference is disregarded. It should be noted that, by the conviction, the court accepted that what was stated in the convicted person's investigative examination was true only as to age, the time of his birth, so that he could be treated as an adult and convicted, and not as to the whole of that statement, in which the defendant had declared from the first moment that he had been a migrant, or, as recorded in the corresponding official examination document, an irregular migrant. Of course, a foreigner defending himself through an interpreter could not have declared and described himself by such a stigmatizing term.