CIVIL-RIGHTS groups have expressed concern over free speech after a Greek court handed two campaigners suspended prison sentences after finding them guilty of defaming an Orthodox bishop.
“We are deeply concerned that prominent human-rights defenders have been convicted of filing a false complaint,” the London-based Humanists International said in a statement.
“That they have been convicted for challenging the promotion of racism and hate speech by a religious leader and for defending human rights and non-discrimination is deeply troubling. The ruling may have far-reaching repercussions for human rights advocates who seek to speak truth to power.”
The organisation, founded in the 1950s, was reacting to the 12-month suspended prison sentences imposed on Andrea Gilbert and Panayote Dimitras, members of Greece’s Humanist Union and Helsinki Monitoring Committee, for making a “false complaint” of anti-Semitism and abuse of office against Metropolitan Seraphim Mentzelopoulos of Piraeus.
It said that both had “long faced harassment and threats” for their human-rights work, and urged the Greek authorities to overturn their convictions as a “gross miscarriage of justice”.
The sentence was also condemned by Amnesty International, which said that imprisonment was “never an appropriate penalty” for defamation, and called the judgment “a tactic of intimidation aimed at silencing human-rights defenders”.
“This trial may create a chilling effect on human-rights defenders advocating against racism and hate speech,” the organisation said. “Under international human-rights law, states are permitted to limit the right to freedom of expression to protect the rights of others. However, limitations on this right must be set forth in law in a precise manner, and must be necessary and proportionate to a legitimate aim.”
Metropolitan Seraphim has long caused controversy among Greece’s 80 Metropolitans for his harsh attitude to social reforms and non-Orthodox faiths. In 2010, he blamed Jews in a TV interview for his country’s debt crisis, while in 2012 he pronounced an anathema against the Pope and “all heretical offshoots of the Reformation”, later attributing legislation to expand gay rights to an “international Zionist monster”.
In a 2017 essay, he complained of being refused entry to Israel for Easter celebrations in Jerusalem, and accused Zionists of seeking “omnipotence and world domination”.
He continued: “The purpose of international Zionism is to prevail one day throughout the universe politically and religiously. To achieve this dream, its cosmopolitan aspirations, it creates various organisations with good intentions but an invisible backdrop, and manages, with satanic ability, to infiltrate ready-made organisations and use them for its dark purposes.”
Mr Gilbert and Ms Dimitras brought a “hate speech” charge against Metropolitan Seraphim after the online essay, which was described by Greece’s Central Board of Jewish Communities as replete with “well-known anti-Semitic stereotypes, conspiracy theories and traditional Jew-hating attitudes”. Prosecutors, however, dismissed the charge in 2019, claiming that the essay should be seen “in the context of Christian Orthodox Church doctrine”. The Metropolitan later filed his own counter-suit, accusing the pair of making false statements against him.
Speaking after the court ruling, Ms Gilbert said that an appeal had been lodged against the “outrageous verdict”, which was “representative of the institutionalised anti-Semitism that exists in Greece”.
Also reacting, Human Rights Watch said that it was concerned that the criminal-justice system in Greece was being “employed by the state against civil society”, while the Geneva-based World Organisation Against Torture warned that human-rights campaigners were being “deliberately targeted for their legitimate work”, and risked “surveillance, judicial harassment, arbitrary arrests, detentions, ill-treatment, entry bans, and expulsions”.
There has been no official reaction from the Orthodox Church, which claims the loyalty of at least 95 per cent of Greece’s 11 million inhabitants, and is protected as a “prevailing religion” under Article 3 of the national constitution.
