Eurasia Press & News
Giannis Kafkas had dreams of making it as a photographer until he was bashed in the back of the head. Fourteen years ago, Greece was in the throes of a sovereign debt crisis that was threatening to bring down the euro-zone. On May 11, 2011, Kafkas joined tens of thousands of his fellow Athenians in a mass demonstration against the crippling austerity measures imposed by Greece’s international creditors. As the crowd snaked past the parliament building, it was abruptly set upon by riot police. “There was no escape, they were beating everyone,” he recalls. “I’ve never seen such fury.”
Through clouds of tear gas and the clamour of stun grenades, Kafkas felt a crushing blow to the back of his head. “It was as if my skull had been shattered,” he said. Then came a second blow, just as intense. Kafkas was rushed to hospital for life-saving surgery. When he awoke after a ten-day coma, unable to speak, he gestured for a pen and paper. “They hit me with a fire extinguisher,” he wrote.
The police said they were not responsible for Kafkas’ injuries, implying that the blame lay with violent protesters. Skirmishes between the police and groups of protesters had become a hallmark of the crisis period, with images of exploding petrol bombs dominating the media coverage. That day too, the TV news led with dramatic images of flaming Molotov cocktails. However, tens of thousands of Greeks had also taken peacefully to the streets. There was no indication that the crowd outside parliament had been behaving provocatively when it was attacked by the police. Moreover, there were many accounts of police using excessive force against the demonstrators.
Kafkas had been marching alongside comrades from a neighbourhood activist collective, carrying a banner calling for economic justice. His injuries made headlines, inflaming the protest movement, and six police officers were eventually charged over the attack. Kafkas emerged from hospital heavily medicated and beset by bouts of dizziness. In need of constant care, he embarked on a gruelling physiotherapy regime. The dream of becoming a professional photographer was abandoned, as was any hope of returning to his day job as a waiter. “Dark days,” is how he describes that period, from an armchair in the Athens office where he now practises as a psychotherapist. Today, the injury that nearly killed him is marked by a deep scar on his head and a difficulty with the use of his left arm.
Fourteen years after the May 11 demonstration, Kafkas is back on his feet and the Greek economy has turned the page on the debt crisis. The right-wing government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has won plaudits from the financial press for its buoyant GDP growth, even if one in four Greeks lives on the threshold of poverty. Moreover, the state has yet to hand over a single cent of the 100,000 euros that it has been ordered to pay Kafkas as compensation. Instead, in a series of courtroom battles, it has denied liability and contested the compensation award.
Kafkas has a calm, analytical manner, befitting his new profession. However, he broke down while describing his injuries, regaining his composure only as he explained why he was not giving up the legal fight. “It’s excruciating, there is nothing pleasant in being subjected to this kind of sadism,” he said. “But there must be some point to carrying on if the state refuses to back down… If I can keep pursuing my case, maybe I can help put an end to this behaviour.”
This investigation reveals how the Greek state goes to extreme lengths to avoid making payouts to the traumatised victims of its failures. Alongside targets of police violence such as Kafkas, the claimants include the injured and the bereaved from mass-casualty events such as transport disasters and the increasingly frequent wildfires and floods. All face a long and costly fight through Greece’s notoriously sluggish court system. Battling them every step of the way has been a phalanx of government lawyers, tasked with litigating each claim to the bitter end.
Government lawyers in Greece are the employees of the State Legal Council, a public body with nearly 500 employees, overseen by the Ministry of Finance. “I put forward all the legal means at my disposal to support and win the motion,” said a Council lawyer, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid professional consequences. “Our client is the state. And when you sue the Greek state, you have the Ministry of Finance against you.”
Vassilis Chirdaris is a lawyer who represents the other side: the citizens who can end up spending the best part of two decades seeking redress. “All states have a mechanism to try to settle cases rather than exhausting all legal means [to fight them],” he said. “But Greece exhausts legal means to a frightening degree. We are one of the worst countries pursuing this hyperbolic approach.”
Greeks who wish to sue the state typically rely on their own funds and on the discounted services of sympathetic lawyers. The state does not detail how much it spends on fighting its citizens in court or on making payouts. Our requests for a breakdown of department budgets went un-answered and data from the justice system is patchy. However, Greece’s record under international law speaks volumes about the justice system’s failures. At the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, the Strasbourg-based court where states can be sued by individuals, Greece is the fifth-largest contributor to the caseload, accounting for 4 per cent of the pending appeals. Turkey is the biggest contributor, followed by Russia, Ukraine and Romania. Greece is the smallest country among the top five by population but ranks second among them in terms of its per capita contribution to the caseload, with Turkey again topping that list.
Chirdaris’ clients include a man who lost his nine-year-old twin daughters and elderly parents in the wildfires that ravaged the area around the seaside village of Mati, just east of Athens, in July 2018. The fires claimed the lives of more than 100 people, many of them burning to death in their homes and vehicles. The authorities stood accused of issuing misleading evacuation orders and bungling the emergency response. An initial court ruling said Chirdaris’ client should receive 870,000 euros in damages for the anguish arising from the deaths of four family members.
The State Legal Council appealed, asking for the claim to be dismissed and for the claimant to pay its legal costs. “The little twin girls died in the arms of the grandparents who were trying to protect them,” Chirdaris said. “The sanctity of human life must be reflected in actions: you ought to compensate if a state organ is at fault. We do not need the state to be vindictive or punitive here.”
Government lawyers said the Mati wildfires were a type of force majeure: an event so extraordinary and unforeseen that it freed the state from any liability. The dead and injured, they argued, were to blame for having placed themselves in the path of the fires.
The government would similarly deny liability in response to a more recent disaster, the deadliest mass drowning in the Mediterranean in the last decade. More than 600 people were killed when an overcrowded fishing vessel capsized near Pylos in 2023. The boat had been carrying migrants and refugees pursuing a better life in Europe. Investigative journalists found evidence suggesting that the vessel had gone down in a botched attempt by the Greek coastguard to tow it towards Italy.
Seventeen members of the coastguard have been charged over the disaster. The agency has denied any wrongdoing and argued that the movements of the migrants and refugees aboard the vessel caused it to sink. While the case has yet to come to trial, a Greek ombudsman’s report has heavily criticised the official investigation into the disaster. Vasilis Tsigaridas, a lawyer and board member at the Hellenic League for Human Rights, an NGO, said Greek governments were increasingly “embracing the theory of individual responsibility” as a stock response in order to absolve themselves of liability.
The claims that go against the state, like the lawyers challenging them, are paid out of public coffers. The state owes it to the public to contest claims that it believes to be frivolous or unwarranted. Experts say the Greek state challenges the claims reflexively, regardless of the legal merits of the case. When higher courts rule against the state, as happens often, the eventual payout is far greater than the sums first awarded.
“Compensation awards are interest-bearing, and the interest only adds to the costs,” said Antonis Argyros, a legal scholar and former cabinet minister who has written extensively on the State Legal Council’s handling of compensation claims. “By persistently appealing cases that it ends up losing, the state is forced to pay out multiple times the sums originally set out as reparations.”
The duty to protect is a cornerstone of the contract between citizens and the modern nation state. The citizens pay their taxes to the state which in turn pays for police officers, soldiers, building and food-safety inspectors, emergency services, hospitals and courts. Where a state fails in the duty to protect, the victims of its failures are entitled to compensation. However, in rejecting liability for its failures, the Greek state tacitly rewrites the contract with the citizens.
As a result, people owed redress by the state will think twice before pursuing it. Facing the prospect of interminable trials and ruinous costs, many choose to walk away. The EU Commission’s latest assessment of the rule of law in the country concluded that fewer than four in ten Greeks regarded judges and courts as genuinely independent.
The obligation to compensate is enshrined in EU laws, the Greek constitution, and in the national legal system. “The constitution does not tolerate harm suffered by a person as a result of the actions of any state institution to remain uncompensated,” said a 2019 judgment from the Council of the State, the supreme administrative court, one of many rulings re-enforcing the obligation.
If the law is crystal clear, why has it been so poorly implemented? Compensation battles often play out for more than a decade, spanning changes of government. Giannis Kafkas is currently fighting for a payout under a right-wing government, but his claim fared no better under previous administrations.
The problem, according to legal scholar Antonis Argyros, has less to do with the ideology of whichever party happens to be in power and more to do with a prevailing mindset within the Greek state. Argyros said the State Legal Council traditionally takes its lead from the Ministry of Finance, which pushes for cases to go all the way to the highest court in the land. This “outdated” approach had escalated since the recent economic crisis, he said.
The pressure to litigate took subtle forms, according to the lawyer from the State Legal Council who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The political leadership does it wearing a glove,” the lawyer said. “It will never put it in writing or flat-out give an order. But it will pick up the phone and nudge [the case] in the preferred direction.”
The lawyer said colleagues felt they had no choice but to fight claims at the first instance, even if they personally believed a case should be settled. “Unfortunately, my opinion is stifled in the office… It’s not easy to settle a case without even launching an appeal.”
We asked the State Legal Council to explain its criteria for appealing against compensation awards. In an e-mailed statement, the council said its lawyers considered the “legal and substantive validity of the claims of the opposing parties” in a balanced and unbiased manner when they defend the interests of the state.
The State Legal Council is headquartered in an unremarkable, modern office block in central Athens, a short walk from the spot where Kafkas was assaulted. Its lawyers tend to work out of the ministries to which they are assigned. Its budget – which covers salaries and operational expenses but excludes payouts – has increased by nearly 15 per cent per cent over the last five years.
At the same time, the Council seems to be losing most of the cases where it appeals the compensation award. A log of court decisions in the body’s annual reports from the last two years shows that a majority of rulings in 2023 – and around half in 2024 – went against it.
Greece also fares badly at the ECHR, where the majority of cases brought against the state have resulted in convictions. Last year, Greece was the subject of 27 judgements at the court, of which 25 went against it. Figures released by the European court show that it has ordered Greece to pay out nearly 23 million euros since 2014. By comparison, the UK and Germany – much larger countries – were ordered to pay out 3 million euros and 1.5 million euros respectively over the same period.
The State Legal Council has denied it challenges claims where it ought to be settling them. In an e-mailed response for this story, the Council said it “did not exert legal means in an abusive or dilatory manner”. The legal route was pursued only “when there are admissible and valid reasons for doing so and, as a result, there is a likelihood of success”.
However, recent events appear to undermine the official insistence that claims are evaluated purely for their legal merit. At the start of this year, the state’s handling of compensation cases came under harsh scrutiny. The government was appealing against the payouts awarded to the victims of the Mati wildfires, attracting critical media coverage. At the same time, Greek towns and cities witnessed massive street protests over the official response to the country’s deadliest ever train disaster – the 2023 collision that killed 57 people at Tempi, in the heartland.
The protesters said the state was stalling the investigation into the crash and covering up its own culpability. As anger over the government surged, Mitsotakis’ poll ratings went into freefall. The administration made a concession. It called off the lawyers in the claims arising from the Mati wildfires and another high-profile disaster: the deadly floods in the Mandra municipality, west of Athens, in 2017. “It is our self-evident duty [to withdraw these appeals],” declared the newly appointed finance minister, Kyriakos Pierrakakis, in a television interview in late March this year. The state has since issued almost three-million euros in related payouts.
The U-turn showed how the State Legal Council’s courtroom strategy could be altered overnight under political pressure. However, there is no sign that the state is backing down in thousands of other marathon compensation cases.
“I think it’s an abuse of his time to be honest,” said Marina Daliani, the lawyer helping Giannis Kafkas to claim damages. Her client believes the struggle with the state has affected him physically and psychologically. “I would like to say that they haven’t managed to take anything from me, but they have, they have put a fear in me.” The dread, he emphasised, was very real. “I feel it in my bones, in the trembling in my arm.”
The charges against the six police officers accused of the assault would be dropped after seven years for lack of evidence. Daliani argues that the investigation was flawed from the outset. In 2016, Kafkas took his claim for compensation to a civil court. The court ruled in his favour five years later, the first acknowledgement from the judiciary that the police were responsible for the assault. Kafkas was awarded 50,000 euros in compensation; the state appealed the award. The appeal was defeated and the compensation owed to Kafkas was doubled by the next court, to 100,000 euros. The state appealed again, with an eleventh-hour petition that nudged the case up to the highest court in Greece.
The slow workings of the Greek court system pose a direct threat to justice, according to Vasilis Tsigaridas, the lawyer and board member at the Hellenic League for Human Rights. Claims for damages were often “inhibited” by flawed pre-trial investigations, he added, while judges in first instance courts tended to be partial to officialdom, especially in cases where police officers were facing criminal charges.
Between 1959 and 2018, Greece racked up roughly 900 convictions at the ECHR. Of these, nearly 60 per cent concerned delays in the administration of justice. The glacial pace of trials routinely comes up in reports from the EU’s Commission and Parliament, as a direct threat to the rule of law in Greece. EU data indicates that Greek courts of first instance are among the slowest in the EU at processing civil and commercial cases, taking an average of two years to reach a verdict.
Kafkas may have to wait another three years before a ruling on the latest appeal. The middle-aged therapist helps his clients come to terms with the world as it is, but his political spirit endures, tempered by the long stand-off with the state. “It is not about the compensation itself,” he said. “From the cop’s hand to the government lawyers, there is a continuity. I will only feel vindicated if all that I have been through, this whole process, means that some cop will think twice before raising their hand against a civilian.”
