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

In every criminal court the trial consists of a procedure with a beginning, a middle and an end, which develops on the basis of specific rules, the so-called “procedural rules”, most of which are contained in a special book, the “Code of Criminal Procedure” (CCP). The criminal courts try those persons (the perpetrators - defendants) who perform acts (criminal and punishable acts) prohibited by law. Most prohibited acts are contained in another book, the “Penal Code” (PC). Because of the multiplicity of legislation, there are also the so-called “special criminal laws”, by which a multitude of forms of conduct are criminalized, that is, punished with penalties. It is possible for even the most careful and law-abiding citizen to be dragged into a trial as a defendant for breaching one of the special criminal laws. Every court must (has an “official duty” to) carefully examine whether one or more acts of one or more defendants brought before it are prohibited by the Penal Code (or by a special criminal law), and also whether, according to law, a penalty should or should not be imposed, whether monetary or involving deprivation of the liberty of the defendant or of several defendants. According to criminal legislation, it is possible to impose on the defendant, instead of a penalty, a “security measure”, as, for example, when the defendant is not criminally responsible (psychopathic, demented, etc.), in which case confinement in a clinic for treatment may be ordered. The codes (the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code) exist in order to exclude arbitrariness, because the court must observe the so-called procedural and criminal rules with absolute devotion, consistency and responsibility. Thus, trials of expediency are prohibited, and only trials conducted according to the laws are permitted, because otherwise those who judge (the judges), if they do not faithfully apply the laws, if they do not respect them and set them aside, are inadequate and commit serious disciplinary and legal wrongs, such as the offence of abuse of power (provided for in article 239 of the Penal Code). Although the courts often fail to observe and violate these laws (with a frequency that tends to become the rule), sanctions are not imposed on those who judge (judges and prosecutors). Thus, our country is condemned by the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR) for frequent violations, with the imposition of fines and other consequences that damage the prestige of the state. Most of the trials that have been conducted or are conducted under illiberal, authoritarian, tyrannical and totalitarian regimes are not trials of legality, but unjust trials, trials of expediency. Consequently, trials of expediency must be excluded, and those who support and conduct such unlawful trials must be scrutinized, because they violate the laws by which fundamental human rights and human freedoms are protected (such as the right of defence and freedom of speech). Many of the trials in our country are trials of expediency. That is, they are trials that are not based on the laws but on calculations and maneuvers that presuppose setting the laws aside. A characteristic example of a trial of expediency, which was not based on the laws, is the one conducted before the five-member Court of Appeal of Athens, which convicted the foreign minor as though he were an adult [Nomika Epilekta: “conviction of a foreign minor as an adult”]. Specifically, when the court found that the foreign defendant, when tried at first instance and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, had been a minor, instead of referring him to a juvenile court and correcting the error, it tried him as an adult and imposed a sentence equal to the time he had unjustly remained in prison. The foreigner had been deprived of his liberty for more than four years, and they imposed on him a sentence of four years, four months and twenty-five days. Thus, the foreigner was released after so many years of unjust imprisonment, and the state, by imposing the sentence, covered up the error of the minor’s conviction (and avoided the obligation to compensate him for the years of unjust deprivation of liberty), conducting a trial of expediency, to which there also corresponds a penalty of expediency. Such trials are frequent and do not promote the sense of justice. It cannot be maintained that courts imitate Solomon by issuing “Solomonic” decisions, because instead of such imitation judges must observe (respect) the laws with a sense of leniency and humanity, which tends to disappear from our harsh society. There are many trials of expediency, convictions of expediency, and criminal prosecutions and pretrial detentions launched for reasons of expediency, chiefly against the weak, the sick, those made targets by the media, the young, and also opponents of the powerful (examples: the pretrial detention of all members of the family of a defendant in the “Siemens” case; the pretrial detention of Abbot Ephraim and its continuation in order to satisfy widespread anti-clericalism; the life sentence imposed on an unrelated brother of a drug addict so that the drug addict would be compelled to surrender; the pretrial detention of a woman about to give birth under the pretext of her participation in a non-existent criminal organization; the continuation of the imprisonment of a 91-year-old military man, on the pretext that he had not yet repented and had not been reformed after 40 years of deprivation of liberty; and countless other corresponding examples of judicial inhumanity). For reasons of expediency, those who are proven guilty are not convicted, such as hooded arsonists of cities, members of extremist political organizations for the desecration of monuments, organized vandals who destroy public property, party placemen, legal professionals who support usurers, and others in analogous categories of offenders. Others, again for reasons of expediency, are not prosecuted, such as political fraudsters, embezzlers of public money when part of it flows into party funds, fabulously wealthy feudal lords, and the judges themselves as well as their relatives. Consequently, we find the existence of trials of expediency that end either in unjust conviction or in unjust acquittal. We find the existence of prosecutions for reasons of expediency and abstention from prosecutions for the same reason. In these cases there is contempt for the law, abuse of power, and a serious deficit of ethos and morality that is dangerously growing and may end in the weakening of the foundations of our society, which are already shaking because of the crisis of institutions and the loss of national orientation…