The former president of PaSoK, Evangelos Venizelos, commented on the quality of the Rule of Law in Greece, while he also referred to the Mati trial.
The professor of Constitutional Law and former deputy prime minister, speaking to ERTNews, was asked to comment, among other things, on the decision in the trial of the national tragedy in Mati, which did not lead to prison for any of the accused.
“To express an opinion about a trial without having watched it, and in fact about a criminal trial based on orality, i.e. the hearing process, I would say that it is inappropriate, scientifically impermissible”, Mr. Venizelos initially said, adding that when seen the text of the decision, together with the minutes, could be expressed.
“We do not judge with the common sense of justice, but…”
However, he characteristically noted that “there is the infamous common feeling about law, which of course must affect us and of course we respect it”, but he added that “in a state of law, the law is the one that applies, and the competent body, the court, is what decides. If we were to judge on the basis of the public’s sense of justice, we would lead to unacceptable results for the constitutional state, for the modern state and, of course, the post-modern one”.
“I understand the anger, I understand the journalistic criticism, the search for empathy, but it is as if we are asking the judge to judge on the basis of an expediency, an important, maybe even sacred expediency, but an expediency nonetheless,” he emphasized, explaining that “anyone Even if the Code was in force, a prosecution has been brought for acts of a misdemeanor nature”.
And he added that “from then on, no one compels, I mean no law, no Penal Code compels a court to recognize all mitigating factors, to necessarily, in any case, convert the sentence and give suspensive force to the appeal that is made” .
“We have the rule of law, but there are shadows and violations”
Asked to comment on the quality of the rule of law in Greece, after the European Parliament’s landmark resolution, Evangelos Venizelos emphasized that “we have a rule of law. Greece, from the Postcolonial period onwards, in the last 50 years, has been moving in the sphere of Western democracies, constitutional democracies, liberal democracies. Liberal democracy is the democracy that coexists with the rule of law, with human rights, with the principle of legality and above all with the principle of constitutionality”.
However, to the question of whether there are shadows, he replied that “of course there are shadows, of course there are violations of human rights and institutional guarantees, of course there are problems in relation to the privacy of communications, in relation to the operation of independent Authorities, there are problems which they are connected to the functioning of justice and to the internal independence of justice, because external interventions are not critical, but internal ones. There are protests on many different issues, which are recorded in a – I would say – standard way by various international observers”.
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