I was released on November 17, 2023, after 8.5 years of detention in prison for my participation in the Revolutionary Struggle.
Under the current legal framework for a twenty-year prison sentence like mine, I could have been released earlier if I had more wages. However, the large number of trials, my constant transfers from Eleonas prison to Korydallos prison and the repeated quarantines that I was forced to undergo due to the transfers (covid regime), were the reasons why I lost many months of wages, increasing the time I spent in closed prison. The judicial council that decided on my release did nothing more than refuse to place me in an exceptional situation and decide as it has been deciding for years for the many hundreds of other prisoners.
A few days after my release, a deputy prosecutor of appeals in Chalkida appealed the decision of the Thebes misdemeanor court by which I was released, asking to return me to prison. On January 10, 2024, I was tried by a judicial council in Chalkida on the basis of an appeal requesting my re-imprisonment.
It is a given that this appeal was decided following multifaceted political pressures exerted upon my release. This development was evident from publications, journalistic and political commentaries. Various regime cadres, engaged in the most extreme manifestations of state repression and without even knowing the legal framework they invoke, protested my release and my sentences, without knowing me, without having done the slightest research, without having ever been to any of my trials, without having read anything that I have testified in my many trials. With publications instigated by regime political factors or by their own political choice to push repressive politics and systemic politics in general towards increasingly extreme (always towards the far-right) tendencies, they contribute to the formation of a “circulating atmosphere” that determines – despite whatever ridiculous arguments are used from time to time – the behavior of the courts.
This has happened in many cases of political prisoners, and not just in my case. Without overlooking, of course, the fact that there are some judges or prosecutors who themselves hold extreme right-wing beliefs and express them in the sentences and decisions for the release of political prisoners by imposing the strictest ones, as happened in the continuous decisions of the Lamia misdemeanor council that rejected the release of my comrade Nikos Maziotis.
The above does not exclude direct interventions in the judicial function by regime political actors, especially in times like the one we are going through, when the drastic suppression of any form of social resistance, even social protest, dominates state policy, especially given the fact that social living conditions are so dramatic for the majority of people that they have made the struggle for daily survival a real nightmare.
In my own course in the courts and prisons, there have been some within the judicial system of power who have recognized that their beliefs or political beliefs cannot determine their decisions and, as the decision of the Thebes misdemeanor court stated, “the prisoner should be required to demonstrate moral values according to the judge’s scale, which, of course, is far removed from that of the applicant for a sentenced person”.
I have been out of prison for a year. The appeal filed against my release is the first to be applied to a political prisoner and the one-year (and longer, it seems) wait for the final decision, with the peculiar hostage regime that this wait means, is also an “innovative” condition. If, in the end, the Chalkida Judicial Council decides to reincarcerate me, decides – to use the words with which the prosecutor’s proposal asking the Chalkida Appeals Council to keep me out of prison ends – “the burdensome and violent interruption of her free cohabitation with her family and especially with her child”, it will be the most extreme and the most vindictive – politically and personally – choice. A choice that can only be interpreted as a “gift” to the political system of power and as a contribution to the course of political totalitarianism.
Pola Roupa
Jan 8, 2025