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

Governments for decades have proved incapable of governing with prudence, moderation and virtue, for the familiar reasons.

Parliament dealt with the entrenchment of privileges, the impunity of members of parliament, the placement of various favorites and the production of an infinite number of bad laws.

Judicial power, euphemistically called justice, successfully imitated the other powers.

The rivalry among the three powers for the predominance of the persons who staff them and of their interests succeeded in showing the judiciary as the most seriously deficient power, although it would have been a blessing if it had preserved the virtues without which a society cannot maintain cohesion and prosper.

The decline of judicial power has created among the people the conviction that only the weak are persecuted while the powerful and privileged are protected.

The people can discipline Parliament and the government through the vote they cast roughly every four years, provided they wish to do so.

They can disapprove of members of parliament, attack politicians by every lawful means, politicians whom some accuse of collective responsibility for the economic collapse, and express their indignation, anger and demands by every means and in every way. Even through the exercise of prohibited physical force (vis atrox), not only in extreme cases under article 120 of the Constitution.

Many members of parliament, ministers and others from the varied political firmament are met with angry attacks at every appearance, even on national and religious holidays. They receive harsh criticism, are satirized and, in many cases, are driven away and forced into private life.

Only the officers of judicial power remain beyond reach, even though it is the only power that claims for itself, through its union bodies, privileges and infallibility (infallibilitas).

Judges and prosecutors reject criticism by invoking the independence of justice, although what is involved is the avoidance of social, political and, above all, scientific and democratic scrutiny.

The absence of criticism and scrutiny, which other actors also cultivate, mainly through ignorance, incapacity and opportunism, has led judicial power to excesses and to the consolidation of a feeling of injustice and lack of trust in judicial judgments.

Articles by certain experts and non-experts come into the public sphere, referring to the judicial function and power, with titles such as the prestige of judges, justice in aphasia, justice wanted, and similar phrases.

These articles are written by former judicial officers who, before their retirement, maintained the same third-world judicial mentality, had the same arrogance and believed that they belonged to a special category of people, with special abilities and rare qualifications, who tolerated neither criticism nor scrutiny.

By now judicial power, because of the absence of scrutiny and with personnel lacking the required qualifications, social, scientific, moral and otherwise, has gone off the rails.

Unjust decisions are issued by inadequate judges, with the assistance of corresponding weaknesses among lawyers, after an absurdly long period of time. Criminal rulings, as a rule, are not the product of calm, objective, impartial, scientifically sound and balanced thought, with respect for the principles of humanism, civilization and democracy. They are decisions of arbitrariness, injustice, inhumanity, arrogance and hubris, issued as a rule through summary, that is, unlawful, procedures.

Most people, pretending, state that they respect judicial decisions and justice, meaning the inadequate judicial power, and do not criticize or react to judicial arbitrariness and widespread social injustice. And judges continue to issue their decisions with an orientation toward avoiding internal scrutiny, exercised by their guild-like inspection, toward getting rid of difficult cases as quickly as possible, especially criminal ones, and toward maintaining a peculiar untouchable status that contributes to the still greater devaluation of the third state power.

Because of the absence of constructive, mainly scientific, criticism and scrutiny of judicial decisions and of the activity of judges and prosecutors, and because of the poor staffing of courts and prosecutor's offices, without overlooking legal inadequacy and oversupply, the following impermissible phenomena are observed: (a) the laws in force are not applied in criminal trials, nor are the fundamental principles that apply in states of law and morality, while arbitrariness and pretense prevail; (b) the accused is treated with prejudice and, contrary to the law, is called upon to prove his own innocence, although he has no such obligation; (c) judges, in their majority, assisted by prosecutors, prefer to remand the unfortunate accused in custody, provocatively trampling on the presumption of innocence, which is a pan-European and worldwide achievement of civilization and humanism; (d) laws are continually enacted that restrict the rights of the accused citizen, without any reaction mainly from bar associations, which have now been transformed from scientific bodies into purely guild-like groups of party action; (e) inhuman penalties are imposed on the weak, the young, foreigners, the poor, the plebeians and the disadvantaged, while the strong, the prominent, the patricians, the economically powerful and the publicly visible receive privileged treatment and do not answer for their offenses; and (f) not even formal communication is maintained among judges, prosecutors and lawyers, co-functionaries for the proper and correct administration of law and justice, but judges barricade themselves and constitute a special class, cut off from the living pulse of social life, which they do not understand.

This unhealthy climate in the field of judicial power gives off strongly the smell of the cholera of the Middle Ages, which most, with very few exceptions, insist on preserving.

The occasion for the above findings was recent judicial decisions that have no connection with modern civilization and democracy.

Specifically, the imprisonment of the abbot of the Vatopedi Monastery was a product of judicial arbitrariness and inhumanity, without reasoning for the judgment of the investigating judge and the council of appeals judges, as a former president of the Supreme Civil and Criminal Court pointed out in his article of 13.01.2012, writing that the ruling on pretrial detention was not reasoned, without mention of any document or testimony.

It was inhuman, unjust and unlawful to maintain the pretrial detention of a young mother of an infant a few months old, who gave birth in prison, under order no. 1891/2011 of the Athens Council of Misdemeanor Judges. The unfortunate woman, who remained in prison for eighteen months, necessarily together with her also imprisoned newborn, was finally released by final decision no. 100/2012 of the three-member Athens Court of Appeals for felonies [Nomika Epilekta: Pretrial detention of a young mother is maintained].

It was inhuman and unjust to convict a foreign minor as if he were an adult [Nomika Epilekta: Conviction of a foreign minor as an adult], to refuse recognition of the right to a retrial for a person sentenced to the inhuman penalty of life imprisonment after Greece was condemned by the European Court of Human Rights [Nomika Epilekta: The Supreme Civil and Criminal Court rejected a convict's application], as well as to sentence a young man to life imprisonment because his accused brother escaped.

Unjust and inhuman decisions, by which the application of law and the principles of humanism and civilization are set aside, are issued continuously. Through them unfortunate accused persons are destroyed, not corrected. Many innocent people are convicted because for several years the principle in doubt, in favor of the accused has not been respected.

As a rule, doubts end in the conviction of the accused, who, feeling injustice and his weakness before the crushing state mechanism, rightly turns into an irreconcilable enemy of society. This situation will be overturned through competent scrutiny of judicial decisions and the upgrading of judicial power so that it becomes the protector of the wronged, the weak and the persecuted, a light that will dispel the darkness of injustice, authoritarianism and disease.