ATHENS REVIEW OF BOOKS

The Government Persecution of the Athens Review of Books
February 12, 2019

FILE - European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, left, and
European Council President Donald Tusk at the EU council building in
Brussels on early Thursday, Sept. 24, 2015. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

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Appeal to Presidents Juncker and Tusk by hundreds of academics and writers

The journal The Athens Review of Books (ARB), the Greek counterpart of the
New York Review of Books, published a reader’s letter that mentioned the
political past of the—until recently—Greek Foreign Minister N. Kotzias as a
leading member of the Communist Party of Greece by characterizing him as a
fanatic Stalinist (“gauleiter of Stalinism”) at that time. Mr. N. Kotzias
(author of books praising the totalitarian Honecker regime and Jaruzelski’s
dictatorship) sued the journal for defamation, demanding 250,000 euros in
compensation.

Court rulings considered the characterization extreme Stalinist to be
defamatory, ignoring the fact that it is a political value judgment about a
public figure. There is evidence that the minister and the government
interfered to pervert the course of justice in order to facilitate the
journal’s persecution. One such strong indication is the fact that in the
Greek Supreme Court, the Court Rapporteur initially called for the case
against the journal to be dismissed for violating the case law of the
European Court of Human Rights as well as the Greek Constitution, but then
voted against her own fully documented report without explanation, only to
be later appointed Vice-President of the Supreme Court by the government.

Since July 2017, at the request of the former Foreign Minister the bank
accounts of the publisher and of the chief editor of the ARB as well as the
journal’s revenues from the Press Distribution Agency have been frozen, in
an obvious attempt to shut it down.

The never-ending persecution of the ARB is an extreme abuse of the ability
that Greek law affords to politicians to file lawsuits against the press
and request excessive sums of money. Because of the latitude provided by
the Greek law they can win these lawsuits in violation of European Court of
Human Rights case law, thus intimidating the press and deterring political
criticism.

In recent decades such an absurd legal prosecution as the case of the
(former) Foreign Minister against the ARB has not been encountered in the
European Union. Recently, three different MEPs’ questions to the European
Commission regarding the journal’s persecution have been tabled at the
European Parliament, while the leader of the Greek opposition stated that
“the persecution of the Athens Review of Books is a shame for the Hellenic
Republic.”
 On October 23rd 2018, the former Minister N. Kotzias publicly confessed:
“I served in the Stalinist left”. It was the statement that he had alleged
as defamatory in his lawsuit and which the courts consequently accepted as
such in condemning the ARB.

Mr. President of the European Commission, Mr. President of the European
Council, we ask you respectfully to use all means at the disposal of the
Commission and the Council in order to save a journal that honors Greek
letters and the Greek press.

USE THIS LINK TO SEE THE SIGNATURES OF DISTINGUISHED ACADEMICS WHO HAVE
SIGNED THE PETITION

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June Samaras
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