The Athens Criminal Court on Monday rejected all mitigating circumstances that could ease the prison sentences incurred by the leaders of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, convicted last week of “leading a criminal organization”, he said. we learned from a judicial source.
• Read also: Greek Neo-Nazi Party Called “Criminal Organization”, Crowds Exult
The leader of Golden Dawn Nikos Michaloliakos, negationist and admirer of National Socialism, as well as six other cadres of the neo-Nazi party face up to fifteen years in prison.
But the announcement of the sentences due on Tuesday was delayed, one of the main defendants calling for the replacement of the three judges of the criminal court.
Independent MEP Ioannis Lagos, a former member of Golden Dawn, entered the Athens courthouse on Monday morning, found an AFP photographer, and called for the replacement of the judges who had found him guilty, according to a judicial source.
In front of the Athens Criminal Court, a few hundred anti-fascist demonstrators awaited the pronouncement of sentences on Monday. “No extenuating circumstances for Nazi criminals”, could be read on banners waved by the demonstrators, noted an AFP videographer.
For the third day in a row, the Athens Criminal Court was deliberating on the prison sentences it must pronounce against some fifty executives and members of the neo-Nazi party, whom it found guilty last week of “Leadership” and / or “membership of a criminal organization”.
After five and a half years of trial, more than fifty people were sentenced unanimously on Wednesday, including 18 former Golden Dawn deputies. Around ten of the 68 defendants were acquitted.
It was the murder of a left-wing activist, the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, on the night of September 18, 2013, which shocked Greece in the midst of the financial crisis and forced the Greek authorities to prosecute the neo-Nazi party, responsible for the murders and violence against migrants and left-wing activists since the 1990s, but which until then had enjoyed near impunity.
Police banned a call for a protest on Monday by supporters of MEP Ioannis Lagos. The latter estimated last week to have been condemned by “a paralyzed team of little people responding to orders and trampling the law in all directions”.
Paramilitary party leader and founder Nikos Michaloliakos also rejected his conviction last week on Twitter.
“We have been condemned on our ideas,” he tweeted. “When illegal immigrants are the majority in Greece, when [le gouvernement] give in to everything in front of Turkey, when millions of Greeks are unemployed in the streets, they will remember Golden Dawn ”. His account was then suspended by Twitter.