There has been a sustained effort by SYRIZA to politically instrumentalize the judiciary, culminating in the Novartis scandal.
May be SYRIZA has been broken into ten pieces, may be Alexis Tsipras may have left them in the cold, all those who came out of the “bamboozled party” may issue one statement after another trying to make noise, but they are still the same people who came out of the same womb.
That is, from the party that gloriously took the baton from PASOK in a sustained relay of attack on Justice. But also in the ongoing attempt to politically instrumentalize Justice, with the sole purpose of hurting their political opponents.
The culmination was the Novartis case, an unprecedented political plot, where masked people became… martyrs and where interference in the judiciary was denounced by its own officials. We all remember that on the evening of February 5, 2018, Papangelopoulos, who was of “another school”, delivered a verdict talking about the biggest scandal of all time – which was eventually given a bucket by judges, starting from the period of the Syriza government.
We have seen unprecedented situations, with prosecutors denouncing anti-regulatory interference, threats against judges, allegations of favouritism and “power centres and corruption“, public statements about how certain cases were handled, interception of personal data, vindictive disciplinary proceedings, pressure for judges to prosecute and… “let them go ahead and get off the hook”! Such was the interference in the judiciary that it caused a civil war within it: A senior prosecutor sued the deputy Minister of Justice for direct interference in her work, the president of the Supreme Court was sued for attempted extortion and bribery, the Minister of Justice exercised disciplinary control over a Supreme Court prosecutor and four other senior prosecutors, following a report by another prosecutor, judges turned to lawsuits against their colleagues
So, no surprise that they are not comfortable with the findings, provisions and decisions of the Supreme Court on wiretapping. And they prefer an “institution” with a five-year life like the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, disparaging the Supreme Court with its two centuries of history and its prosecutor K. Tzavella, who is first in the preferences of his colleagues.
Assaults on Clapa and Adilini
This was preceded by attacks on the president and prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Ms Ioanna Clapa and Ms Georgia Adilini, respectively. They didn’t like those either! It is a well-known episode (1/11/2024), when at the anniversary conference dedicated to the founding of the Council of Europe, organised by the Presidency of the Republic and the Greek Parliament, Mr Tsipras felt that he had to make suggestions to the Judiciary on how it should function. Klapa and Adilini left the room and what they heard is not said. After all, it is well known that when the Judges’ Union had called criticism of the judiciary “uninformed”, Tsipras had boldly responded: “We, the unimpressed, manage to overcome many times even institutional obstacles of those who have a particular haunting, and if we are set up such obstacles, we will overcome them.”
It was in June 2017, when Polakis had called Justice “protection of every pimp”, so Tsipras took it upon himself to respond on his behalf, calling Justice an “institutional obstacle”! Tsipras was then responded to by the Union of Judges and Prosecutors, noting that “treating Justice as an ‘institutional obstacle’ is an extremely dangerous logic, which ultimately contributes decisively to the questioning of the rule of law”.
Socrates Famellos, again, in an interview with SKAI (20/2/2025, “Atairistoi”), had said: “But yes, I have criticized choices of the leadership of the judiciary, such as the wiretapping scandal, and today I judged Ms Adilini. Yes, I don’t trust the leadership of the judiciary because it too often acts as an arm of the government.” And from the floor of the Parliament (25/6/2025), Nikos Pappas did not hesitate to utter: “Klapa and Adilini were promoted with the TV licenses, they rushed to Tempe, they are delayed with the OPEKEPE”! No wonder they prefer Ms. Covesi, who is indifferent to the separation of powers…
What to first remember?
We are talking about those who never pulled their long arm from the neck of justice, using all the illegitimate methods. They appointed the President of the Supreme Court (Ms Thanou) at 2am on 29 June 2015, leaving the seats of the other two high courts vacant. A machination that Rasputin would have envied, after they had announced the ridiculous July referendum, closed the banks, prepared for the September elections and wanted to make sure they had a caretaker prime minister.
When they decided to take control of information with the Pappas law and in view of the Council of State’s decision on TV licences, Tsipras met (6 October 2016) with the presidents of the supreme courts and announced pay rises for judges. Of course, the CoE did not chew the fat. On 28 October 2016, it ruled the Pappa law unconstitutional. And then the collective fire began! The then Prime Minister’s Office itself spoke of parastatalism, Polakis of a “judicial coup“, Gerovassili of a decision that… deprives hospitals of nurses and resources for kindergartens, and Pappas, the minister who had caused the whole anomaly, of “a decision that rightly creates a feeling of injustice in a large part of our people”.
This was preceded by Tsipras’ intervention, at the TIF in September 2016 ahead of the CoE ruling. He had then warned the judiciary not to go against the tender, because… that would mean a lot of money would be lost for the Greek state. From Peristeri, on 16 June 2016, Polakis said that “a large portion of the judges are – to put it politely – dependent or – to put it properly – in the paralegal circuit of the past or present.”
They wanted “other” judges who would make “other” decisions!
And since then he has not stopped arguing that they should appoint three or four thousand judges, who would “train” them in the “other school”, in order to appoint three or four thousand judges to do their job! Tzanakopoulos, the government spokesman at the time, ruled that its decision “is recorded in the ‘black book’ of Greek justice”, while Tsipras, during his visit to the Ministry of Labour, did not hesitate to say that the judiciary “makes decisions in favour of employers”.
On July 5, 2017, from the floor of Parliament, Papaggelopoulos had said: “In the arms programmes there was a period when kickbacks were raining! What rain? It would be better to say a storm, and a tropical one at that, or better or worse, a flood. The unfortunate thing is that much of the political system, and unfortunately some prosecutors and judges, pretended not to understand. The judiciary, in addition to being blind, has added earplugs to its ears. Not only so that it cannot see, but also so that it cannot hear.”
In March 2018, the Council of State annulled the decision of Filis, who, as Minister of Education, had brought about a radical change in the character and way of teaching religious studies in grades 3 to 6 of primary and secondary school. The CoE recalled Article 16 of the Constitution, which states that education is a basic mission of the state and among its purposes is the development of national and religious consciousness. “The decision of the Plenary Session of the CoE on the teaching of religious education in primary and secondary schools is based, according to what has been seen in the public domain, on a rationale from times of long memory, which resembles the obscurantist views of extreme theologians,” SYRIZA said in a statement.
No problem with their own wiretaps
As for the Syriza-era wiretaps, which were revealed by Citizen Lab in 2016, again there was no problem. After all, under their time they had tripled the number of legal connections. So, they had no problem when the KKE denounced that the SDAE had kept investigations into their call center call-centre collocations in the dark for years. They had no problem when intercepted conversations between Thomsen and Velkulescu came to light. They had no problem when, in December 2016, the then president of the Hellenic Financial Intelligence Service, Christos Zambiras, before the Committee on Institutions and Transparency, had stated unequivocally that “the confidentiality of telephone communications is not guaranteed” and that “we are exposed, in the face of the evolution of new technological possibilities”.
When the evolution of technology was responsible!
They listened impassively to all this, they did not lift the world by the bootstraps, instead they said,led by the then chairman of the Commission, Ms Tasia Christodoulopoulou, that either via satellite or with the help of new technology, interceptions can be made that even go as far as voice recognition! As Mr Zambiras had stated at the time, “the aim of the ADEA is primarily to prevent breaches of the confidentiality of communications. By systematically instructing communications service providers on the need to take security measures, a culture of security has been persistently cultivated so that the necessary actions and investments are made and security becomes a fundamental parameter of the services provided.
At the same time, the DPA also developed initiatives to inform users and subscribers of telecommunications services about the self-protection measures they should take to ensure the confidentiality of communications.” That is, they had accepted that the role of the DPAA is to prevent breaches, to guide providers on security measures and to inform subscribers on their self-protection measures. And not to inform them if they have been victims of surveillance.
PASOK’s fiery announcements
Back then, PASOK was on the opposite side. When, in October 2016, Doyakos was declared deposed as head of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Appeal – because, a few weeks before the elections for the election of court administrations, the then current framework was changed, altering judicial self-governance – PASOK said in its statement: “The march towards the complete partisanship of the judiciary continues overtly, with intensity and purposefulness for its complete overthrow. The authority of the judiciary has been damaged once again, with behind-the-scenes methodologies and now open confrontation between the hierarchy of the judiciary and senior judges.”
I also remind PASOK of its statement of September 18, 2017, on the occasion of the selection of the new president of the Supreme Court, when it spoke of a “dark gestation period of months”, “alarming image of an unjustifiably headless Supreme Court”, “unprecedented ‘dive’ into the yearbook”, “blatant disregard for any notion of institutional and meritocratic order”, “instrumentalization of justice”. Concluding: “They are afraid of justice. They are afraid of justice. They are afraid of fearing all forms of corruption. No matter what they do, no matter what they strike, their inevitable march to the end has already begun.”
Today, in the most adventurous way, they have forgotten all that and are aligning themselves with those who denounced them!
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