Greece: Court convicts 21 people for attack on migrants in 2018

A court in Mytilini, the capital of the Greek island of Lesbos, has issued convictions for 21 people, accused of having taken part in an attack against migrants camping in the town’s Sappho square in 2018.

At the time the attack sparked clashes that lasted through the night.

Two of the defendants, reported the Greek newspaper Ekathimerini in English, were handed sentences of six years of imprisonment for multiple offenses, including “threats and dangerous bodily harm with racist motives.” Another two defendants received five-year and nine months prison sentences for “dangerous bodily harm, also with racist motives.”

These sentences, however, have been suspended for three years and are “convertible to a fine of five euros per day,” reported Ekathimerini.

A further 16 defendants were found guilty of “disrupting the peace” and received a year of imprisonment each.

The last person convicted was handed a nine-month prison sentence for the same crime. The length of time to be spent in prison was reduced because of his youth at the time the crime was committed.

This represents the “first time that a court in Lesbos’ capital Mytilini has formally recognized racist motives in a crime,” reports Ekathimerini.

Appeals?

According to information on the website Fair Trials International, the time frames for appeals in Greece tend to be tight, in general within the first ten days after a judgment is issued, if you were present at the trial, and around 30 days if you weren’t present, or don’t live in Greece.

The appeal case, if granted, will be heard around a year later. Often courts will either issue a low sentence in terms of the time to be served in prison, which is not appealable, or they will offer longer prison terms that are possible to appeal, and could be converted into a fine, for every day you should have served in prison, states information on Fair Trials International.

If requested by the defendants, the case could now go to a court of second instance, which is a court of appeal, and from there to a court of cassation, or final appeal. At each stage, the judgments could be overturned.

Moria camp in 2018

The attack for which the defendants were convicted is reported to have taken place in the early hours of April 23, 2018. Migrants had been camping in the middle of the town of Mytilini as an act of protest at the conditions at the time in the migrant camp Moria.

A group of around 200 people turned up at the camp to attack it, injuring several migrants in the process. The police then transferred the migrants back to the Moria camp.

In 2018, organizations like Doctors without Borders (MSF), told the Deutsche Welle (DW) that the Moria camp held an estimated 9,000 migrants, instead of the planned 3,000 capacity.

Conditions were so bad in the camp, a spokesperson for MSF said, that around a quarter of children present in the camp had told MSF operatives that they regularly thought about suicide. DW also reported in 2018 that a group of IS operatives had begun to terrorize some within the camp.

Moria was described at the time as the “worst migrant camp in Europe.” A video from DW stated that the only thing that appeared to function properly in the camp at the time was “criminality, drugs, prostitution and violence.”

The camp continued to grow until a huge fire destroyed much of it in 2020, leaving around 13,000 people homeless.