(ATHENS) Hundreds of anti-fascist protesters demonstrated in Athens on Wednesday morning at the start of the appeal trial of dozens of executives of Greece’s former neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, nearly two years after they received heavy sentences from prison.
Posted at 10:22
“The Nazis in prison forever,” chanted the demonstrators gathered outside the Athens Court of Appeal to demand harsher sentences against the fifty or so Golden Dawn members tried on appeal.
“Do NOT reduce their sentences,” read one of the banners carried by the demonstrators, AFP journalists noted.
The barely started hearing was interrupted by an anonymous bomb threat and adjourned until July 6.
In October 2020, leading members of Golden Dawn – once Greece’s third-largest political party – were sentenced to up to 13 years in prison for the 2013 murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and wild tobacco of migrants and political opponents.
After a trial lasting more than five years, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos and nearly 60 other members were found guilty of participating in a criminal organization.
Prosecutors, however, had requested harsher sentences. And when the verdict was announced, a high-ranking prosecutor immediately appealed, on the grounds that the sentences imposed were too lenient.
Stelios Kostarelos then estimated that the executives of Golden Dawn should be sentenced to the maximum penalty provided by law, ie 15 years in prison.
Entering the courtroom on Wednesday at the opening of the appeal trial, Magda Fyssas, the murdered rapper’s mother, said she and her family were hoping for “the same result (as at first instance): a conviction “.
“They can’t get away with it that easily. Their sentences must be increased,” said an anti-racist activist, Petros Konstantinou, to journalists outside the courthouse.
The main defendant, Michaloliakos, recovering from contracting the coronavirus, was absent on the first day of the appeal trial, which is expected to last at least a year.
Other former Golden Dawn executives on trial include MEP Ioannis Lagos and former party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who formed a new nationalist group.
The river trial of first instance, which lasted more than five years, has been described as one of the most important in Greek political history.
Golden Dawn, a xenophobic and anti-Semitic organization, was on the fringes of Greek politics until the country’s debt crisis in 2010.
She capitalized on public anger over immigration and austerity measures, entering parliament for the first time in 2012 with a total of 18 seats. Three years later, Golden Dawn had become the third political force in the country.