Exporting problems in the administration of justice
Evaluating the work of civil servants is a decades-old demand of Greek society and a pre-election promise of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. It has to be done, despite the fact that employees are – naturally – reacting. It is not only trade unionists who have their own, usually oppositional, agenda. It is also the ordinary employees who are afraid. It may be that we will celebrate 50 years since the restoration of democracy in 2024, but there are memories of a one-party state, when civil servants were not judged on their competence or qualifications, but on their political leanings.
It takes a lot of work and persistence to root out suspicion, work that previous governments did not do. They all promoted their own friends to positions of responsibility.
The safest way to pass such a measure is to start the evaluation from top to bottom. To evaluate the higher-ranking officials first, so that those further down stop being afraid. The government should start, say, with the legal knowledge of those who make up the Legal Council of the State (NSK), who, after Greece’s condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the unfair trial of the former head of Greece’s statistics agency ELSTAT, Andreas Georgiou, submitted a request for a review of the case by the full plenary of the ECHR.
Even a first-year law student understands that the application will be rejected. It will be a waste of taxpayers’ money. The question is “So why did they submit it?” One answer is that this is standard bureaucratic practice.
The NSK is, in a way, exporting what characterizes the Greek judicial system: the wasted time
Even in flagrant state violations of the law, the NSK will exhaust legal remedies; it did so with the compensations of those affected by the deadly 2018 wildfires in Mati. It is something that needs to be evaluated in order to fix it.
The second answer is that they succumbed to political pressures, which in this particular case were many, and the judges’ compliance to those pressures does not honor justice. This is also something that must be assessed: whether the educated jurists of the NSK turn a blind eye to logic in order to serve the irrational, as dictated by political expediency.
There is a third, darker answer. That the lawyers of the state want to show the “not so clever” guys of Strasbourg what the Greeks go through when they get involved in a judicial process.The NSK is, in a way, exporting what characterizes the Greek judicial system: the wasted time in the administration of justice.
After the evaluation of the state’s attorneys is finished, we must move on to the judges. There are safe indicators to judge their work. But we must continue tomorrow.
