Police functions, practices and human rights protection: the case of Greece

Abstract

Police Directorates are multiple and so are their functions. All these years, a series of human rights violations have occurred among these functions. So, the United Nations in order to minimize unlawful Police actions and promote the legitimate and appropriate manners of law enforcement for the sake of the entire society and without any discriminations towards the vulnerable social groups, formulated the rightful code of conduct for policemen which is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Human Rights Law and the International Humanitarian Law. Principal Functions of the Police, such as arrest, detention, investigation, use of force and firearms, law enforcement in times of armed conflicts and terrorist attacks, the correct attitude towards particularly sensitive social groups, such as women, juveniles and refugees, as well as, Police’s responsibilities, duties and lawful management of firearms constitute the mandatory knowledge n officer must have. However, apart from United Nations and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which constitutes the international umbrella of human rights, there are further transnational instruments and tools that secure human rights protection, such as the European Charter of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights for the European cases of human rights infringement, combined with the European Court of Human Rights for vast justice bringing to the victims of human rights abuse. On the Greek domestic level, Police has been for many years associated with far right movements and very conservative beliefs, often leading to its officers committing serious crimes against minorities and vulnerable individuals. During the period of the dictatorship, Police constituted the main instrument of maintenance of that regime via its notorious and abominable torture and exile sending of the opposed to the, so called “Regime of the Colonel”. The contribution of the European Instruments played a dominant role, but the final overthrow came with the bloody Polytechnic Uprising in 1973. Some very dominant public figures, who got heavily tortured during that era, are Spyros Moustaklis and Alexander Panagoulis. As long as it concerns the contemporary Greece, Police values remain up to a certain degree the same. Arbitrariness, abuse of power and torture still take place, whereas justice restoration seldom occurs. The press, illegal migrants, addicts, refugees and marginalized people constitute the most frequent victims, while juveniles are not excluded from torture. Some very famous cases are the ones of Alexander Grigoropoulos, Nikos Sakellion, Augustine Dimitriou and Zak Kostopoulos. The conditions now of the Greek prisons are cruelty unhealthy and dangerous. The convictions of Greece by the European Court of Human Rights are numerous. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis hitting Europe incommoded the already dysfunctional European reality of the financial crisis, as Euroscepticism, extremism and nationalism got raised. Many E.U. states, after their national elections that brought the far right parties to power, embraced a very strict anti-migratory policy and closed their borders to refugees. A number of human rights violations got recorded all over Europe. In the Greek level, many human rights infringements of the asylum seekers occurred by the authorities and that lead to multiple convictions by the ECtHR. The deepest though wound constitute the unaccompanied children who live under terrible conditions. Referring to the Greek national level, alterations to the Penal Code have been made in order to penalize unlawful police acts and bring corrupted state officials to justice. Multilevel change and strong control and reorganization of the Police, combined with justice restoration and the formation of an effective judicial system must take place in order for the society to get significantly ameliorated.