ABTTF President: “The official acknowledgment of racist Golden Dawn Party which also targeted several times the Turkish community in Western Thrace and exercised both verbal and physical attacks in the recent past as a criminal organisation is an important victory for our country Greece.”
The Court of Appeal of Greece’s capital city of Athens gave its decision in the case where members of the racist Golden Dawn Party have been standing trial. The court decided that the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party is a criminal organisation in the trial which has been continuing for more than five years.
The court found the party's leader Nikolaos G. Michaloliakos and six members of the party, Ilias Kasidiaris, Giannis Lagos, Giorgios Germenis, Ilias Panagiotaros, Panagiotis Iliopoulos and Nikos Papas, guilty of running a criminal organisation and eighteen other defendants guilty of being members of a criminal organisation.
In the same case, Giorgios Rupakias, a member of the Golden Dawn Party, who stabbed singer Pavlos Fissas in the heart in Athens’ Keratsini district in 2013, was also found guilty.
In the trial of a total of 69 defendants, the managers and members of the Golden Dawn Party were charged with forming and running a criminal organisation, possessing weapons without permission, blackmail and racist violent acts. It was reported that the sentences of the defendants will be announced in the coming days.
The far-right Golden Dawn Party, which won 2.93 percent of the vote in the general elections last year in Greece, was left out of parliament because it could not surpass the 3 percent electoral threshold.
“The decision of the Court of Appeal that the far-right Golden Dawn Party is a criminal organisation is an important victory in the name of democracy and the rule of law in Greece. In the recent past, Golden Dawn Party often targeted the Turkish community in Western Thrace and exercised both verbal and physical attacks. Before the start of the conference we as ABTTF organised in the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels in March 2016, the MEPs belonging to the Golden Dawn Party raided the conference room and made threats and insults. The court ruling confirms how much of a threat to democracy and human rights the racist Golden Dawn Party, officially acknowledged as a criminal organisation, is”, said Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).
