Hate on the Streets: Human Rights Watch on racist violence in Greece

  hrw.org
 

This report is based on interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with 59 people who experienced or escaped a xenophobic incident, including 51 serious attacks, between August 2009 and May 2012. Victims of serious attacks included migrants and asylum seekers of nine different nationalities and two pregnant women. Patterns emerge from the victim testimonies: most of the attacks take place at night, on or near town squares; attackers, who include women, work in groups, and are often dressed in dark clothing with their faces obscured by cloth or helmets; bare-fisted attacks are not uncommon, but attackers also often wield clubs or beer bottles as weapons; most attacks are accompanied by insults and exhortations to leave Greece, and in some cases the attackers also rob the victims.

Among the migrants and asylum seekers Human Rights Watch interviewed, Ali Rahimi, an Afghan asylum seeker, was stabbed five times in the torso outside an apartment building in Aghios Panteleimonas in September 2011; Mehdi Naderi, an undocumented Afghan migrant, has a prominent scar on his nose from a December 2011 attack in which he was beaten by a mob with sticks and an iron bar near Attica Square; and Afghan refugee Maria N.’s left hand was ripped open in August 2011 when two men on a motorcycle hit her with a wooden club with iron spikes as they drove by.

 

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The true extent of xenophobic violence in Greece is unknown. Government statistics are unreliable due to failures of the criminal justice system, beginning with law enforcement, to adequately identify, investigate and prosecute hate crimes. 

 

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Non-governmental sources help fill in the gaps. In June 2011, Doctors of the World director Nikitas Kanakis estimated that 300 victims of racist attacks had sought treatment at the organization’s clinic in Athens in the first half of 2011. Tzanetos Antipas, the head of the Greek non-governmental organization (NGO) Praksis, said at the same time that they had treated just over 200 victims in roughly the same period. Finally, a network of NGOs recorded 63 incidents between October and December 2011 in Athens and Patras.

Greece has clear obligations under international human rights law to undertake effective measures to prevent racist and xenophobic violence, to investigate and prosecute perpetrators, and should condemn publicly and unequivocally such violence. These obligations apply whether the perpetrators of the violence are agents of the state or not.

 

Yet the cases documented in this report demonstrate that migrants and asylum seekers have little chance of seeing justice done. Victims of xenophobic attacks in Athens face many obstacles in reporting crimes and activating a police response to attacks. Prosecutors and the courts have so far failed to aggressively prosecute racist and xenophobic violence for what it is. Preoccupied by the economic crisis and concerned with control of irregular immigration, national authorities—as well as the EU and the international community at large—have largely turned a blind eye.

 

This is a characteristic excerpt from the Human Rights Watch report on racist violence in Greece (my emphasis); the full text may be read online here, and is also available as a free download here. 

This report is a substantial international account of "Greece's epidemic of racist attacks," as the title of Eva Cosse's article in The New York Times had put it, and provides detailed documentation of xenophobic violence in Athens, as well as elsewhere in Greece. It also discusses the political context, including the government's plan to round up and detain undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, which is incompatible with the country's obligations under international law, and the role of the neo-fascist party Golden Dawn. 

Furthermore, the report documents the failure of the police and the judiciary to acknowledge, record, prevent, and punish racist violence. As Judith Sunderland put it in her article Attacks on democracy in Greece, "[a]bove all, those who engage in violence need to be held to account."

The report concludes with significant and detailed recommendations to the Government of Greece, and specifically to the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, and the Ministry of Justice, as well as to the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the United Nations. Its key recommendations are as follows:

       To the Greek Government

• Publicly and unequivocally condemn, at the highest level, instances of racist and xenophobic violence.
• Urgently address deficiencies in police action to prevent and investigate reports of racist violence by: 

• Moving quickly to institute the special form for recording allegations of racist violence and the centralized database;
• Ensuring obligatory and appropriate training at all levels and in-service training on detecting, preventing, responding to, and investigating hate crimes, including racist and xenophobic violence for all police officers; and
• Disseminating detailed guidelines for police for the investigation of hate crimes, including racist and xenophobic violence.

• Adopt and implement a preventive strategy to counter xenophobic violence, including appropriate deployment of law enforcement in areas with high rates of such violence.
• Ensure, either in law or through binding circulars, that regardless of the nature of the offense, any crime that may be categorized as a hate crime is subject to mandatory state action – investigation and prosecution – without the requirement that victims pay the 100 Euro (US$ 125) fee.
• Improve the response of the judiciary by:

• Reforming the Criminal Code to improve the scope and application of the aggravating circumstance of racist motivation;
• Ensuring appropriate training, including through inclusion of special seminars in continuing professional education courses, for prosecutors and judges in national and European anti-racism legislation; and
• Encouraging the appointment of one or more specialized prosecutors in relevant public prosecutor’s offices including Athens to provide technical expertise to colleagues prosecuting such cases.

         
       To the European Union 

• The European Commission’s Directorate General on Justice should assess Greece’s compliance with its human rights obligations with respect to preventing and prosecuting racist and other hate violence, and allocate funding to support initiatives to address the deficiencies in state response to racist and xenophobic violence, as well as public awareness-raising campaigns.