Family members of Nikos Romanos, the imprisoned anarchist who is staging a hunger strike demanding the right to be able to attend university, held a press conference today expressing their support for his cause and concern for his health.
Romanos, who is serving a prison sentence for robbery, was denied leave to attend classes by a magistrate who deemed him to be a flight risk even after Romanos successfully gained a place at an Athens university while in a prison education programme. In protest at the decision, Romanos launched a hunger strike which is now in its 22nd day, with doctors expressing concern for his life.
Romanos was recently photographed in a window of the hospital where he is being treated appearing gaunt (above).
A Piraeus court is due to rule today on an appeal against the magistrate's initial decision.
Earlier appeals to the Justice Ministry to intervene have fallen on deaf ears, with Minister Charalambos Athanasiou, saying that the issue was out of his hands. He also proposed a distance learning course as a possible solution, a suggestion which has been widely mocked as unworkable by Romanos’s supporters.
“The life of my child is in great danger and the Minister of Justice, with his hypocritical and calm and sober style has been dealing with [electric] bracelets for two years,” Giorgos Romanos, Nikos Romanos’s father, said today - referring to slow-moving Ministry plans to adopt electronic ankle bracelets for prisoners.
He added that the Minister and the government “act as if they don’t understand, that they will bear sole responsibility for what happens from now on.”
Petros Damianos, the director of the High School of the Avlonas prison which Romanos attended, described Romanos as the ‘second victim’ of the murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in April 2008 which triggered widespread rioting throughout Greece. Romanos was friends with Grigoropoulos and watched him die after he was shot through the heart by a policeman. Damianos described Romanos as an “exceptional kid with a free spirit and a strong mind. I enjoyed his company.”
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Nikos Romanos’s mother, Pavlina Nasioutzik also described how witnessing his friend’s murder altered the course of Nikos’s life. “The murder of Alexi changed Nikos. It changed him more than even I can describe to you,” she said. “After the murder he didn’t want to even be photographed. The last one I have is from when he was much younger.”
Critics say that the Ministry is culpable in the continued detention of Romanos, vindictively following the letter of the law as opposed to the spirit of it, with the distance learning proposals effectively a fig leaf. Effectively they believe that Romanos, an avowed anarchist, is being punished for his political views.
“The proposal for distance learning of the minister conceals a show of force,” N. Tsoukala, a criminologist, said at today’s press conference. “I don’t have an emotional attachment with Romanos. I met him as an inmate and I can tell you that I would really like to have him as a student.”
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