Institutional games stoke suspicion
We don’t know what happened in the trial concerning the ordeals of the Athens child who was sexually abused and exploited, as the hearing was held behind closed doors. Nor do we know why the prosecutor came to the conclusions she did. The first thing we need to remember, though, is that the only thing that counts in a trial is what can be proven, not what people think may have happened. It is a fundamental part of the judicial process, designed to protect us all. More people have been jailed, tortured and killed by arbitrary condemnations of guilt (often not passed down by a judge) than people threatened because bad decisions allowed guilty parties to walk free.
However, the resounding public outcry sparked by the prosecutor’s summation should be cause for concern, particularly since she did not recommend that the key suspect be let off the hook entirely. What she did say was the he should be found guilty of a slew of serious offenses, except for raping and pimping the girl, who was 12 years old when the events in question unfolded.
What the public reaction to the prosecutor’s recommendations shows us is a serious deficit of trust in the judiciary, similar to that in other institutions. This distrust erodes the fabric that keeps society together and stokes the fires of social unrest: “No justice, no peace,” as the slogan goes. It also ebbs or grows depending on the actions of all three powers. The governing majority’s pathetic performance in various parliamentary committees investigating serious matters, for example, has certainly contributed to this wave of suspicion, perhaps even more so than the photographs showing the chief suspect in the Athens girl’s case embracing top government officials.
The fact that the judiciary does not seem to have made an ounce of progress on the wiretapping scandal a year and a half after it broke – despite the prime minister’s assurances that “plenty of light will be shed” on the affair – has had a knock-on effect on the prosecutor’s findings in a completely unrelated affair. Not to mention the fact that the Supreme Court has yet to send the ADAE privacy watchdog the documents needed to start the process of cross-checking the list of 92 politicians, journalists, businesspeople and others who had been targeted with the illegal Predator spyware and those who were under surveillance by the National Intelligence Service in 2021-2022, as To Vima newspaper reported earlier this week.
The government’s games with the country’s institutions appear painless because they’re not having a toll on public opinion polls. What they are doing, though, is stoking suspicion – and when inflamed enough, suspicion can lead to the kind of outbursts of violence we saw in December 2008.
