Thursday, November 29, 2007

Suing the police

Today I finally entered that most Kafkaesque of world; the Greek judicial system. I filed a suit against the riot police who attacked me without reason on 8th September this year (see here for more details). The interesting thing about this whole procedure are the details. For example to file suit the court clerk used at least ten stamps and I lost count after the 30th time she used them to stamp the documents I and my lawyer had brought with us.

Another fascinating detail is that in order to sue somebody you need to have a tax number (ΑΦΜ) so making it impossible for large swathes of the population such as immigrants and those working in unregistered jobs to use the system. We wouldn't to lower the tone of the place by letting in riff - raff now, would we?

I know my chances of achieving anything with this action are somewhere between slight and non-existent but I felt I had to make the gesture if only because I'm in the privileged position to do something. That is a luxury many victims of police violence here do not have.

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