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

It has become understood that in our country the institutions are being tested, state structures have been disintegrated and society is suffering from an unprecedented crisis that does not seem likely to be overcome soon.

Within the climate of decline (which is not only, nor mainly, economic), not even the judicial power remained unscathed, although it has undertaken the faithful application of the laws, the resolution of disputes and the prosecution of crime.

The courts (that is, the numerous judges) delay excessively in issuing decisions, and those that are issued often have no relation to sound judgment and justice.

Excessive sentences are imposed, often without checking the age of those convicted, the conditions under which they violated the law and their personal situation (education, family, origin, poverty, health). And rarely, by chance, is anyone who is convicted corrected. On the contrary, he becomes worse, full of hatred and a will for revenge against society, because he feels that he was judged neither fairly nor humanely and according to the offense, but according to the impressions and moods of the judges on the day of the trial and conviction.

As happens with Parliament (staffed by professionals of politics, to a great extent without principles, ideology and abilities) and the Government (composed mostly of persons without a profession and without qualifications), the Courts have been staffed by persons who only by exception have the ability to resolve disputes between citizens and the state and to punish offenders, and especially perpetrators of serious crimes, with a prospect of correction.

Of course, within the totality of the inadequate, there stand out great officers of true Justice, whose worth, however, is rarely recognized. Their valuable services are downgraded because of generalized inadequacy. Most of them do not rise to the highest level of the judicial hierarchy. Black darkness swallows them...

Judicial decisions are issued after many years, and the many-year delay in applying the laws affects the judicial power and destroys its authority.

Without a good government and with a parliament of wretched staffing we can live. We will not, however, survive without courts of authority. Without trust in the mechanisms of administering (even deficient) justice, or what we have become accustomed to calling “justice”, which is also the “salt” of society: “but if the salt loses its savor, with what shall it be salted? [You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its savor, with what shall it be salted? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men (Matt. 5, verses 13, 14)].

Most of those who deal with the problems of the judicial power claim that denial of justice, the unbelievable delays in resolving disputes, the poor quality of judicial judgments, the creation of networks (para-judicial and others), arrogance, the triumph of injustice and generalized insecurity are due to the lack of infrastructure, material means, more judges and court clerks, the litigiousness of Greeks (the citizens’ “quarrelsomeness”), government interventions and the overpopulation of lawyers.

Beyond these factors, however, which must not be pushed aside, the main cause of the bad administration of justice is the lack of principles, ideology, virtues, experience, adequate training and education, which have been replaced by thirst for power, for prevalence and self-promotion and, above all, by the Sisyphean effort for the financial success of most of those who staff the judicial power, without the continuous effort and sacrifices required by the choice to serve the function of judge, as well as the other positions of the highest responsibility and supreme duty toward society (such as in prosecutors’ offices, court secretariats, the Ministry of Justice, the Legal Council of the State, the associations of lawyers, notaries and judicial bailiffs).

In order to acquire a judicial power that administers Justice, we must staff it with personalities of special abilities, education, willingness to offer and to make sacrifices. The Judge cannot be a professional, just as prosecutors and lawyers should not be professionals. All of them are characterized by legislation as officers precisely to make clear that they first fulfill their duties by serving the institution of Justice and only afterward concern themselves even with covering their living needs. But do such officers exist today? Certainly. They exist, but they are not promoted, they make no noise, they do not disturb, because they are devoted (soul and body) to serving duty, which they have identified with their very breath. But they are not many. They are very few and cannot, by themselves, change the downhill course of devaluation that the judicial power as a whole has chosen to follow.

For the first time worldwide, judicial officers, imitating professional trade unionists, strike or, as lawyers state, “abstain” from trials. Thus there appeared the phenomenon that one of the three state powers, the most sensitive one (despite the oaths, the constitution and the laws it must apply), breaches its elementary obligations to hear cases, civil, criminal and others, which stagnate, rot and fester.

How inappropriate the judges’ strike is, like that (to a second degree) of lawyers and court clerks, becomes clear if we imagine the entire government going on strike or parliament going on strike!

In other words, we stand before the irrational, before the phenomenon of the generalized dissolution of everything. We must do something (each person in his own field and from the position in which he finds himself). We must make intelligent moves, leaving behind inertia, sterile criticism from safety and complex-driven protests, which produce no income, in order to stop the breakdown that threatens to turn our everyday life into hell.