Nine people from the United Kingdom and the European Union member states are facing deportation from Greece days after they took part in a protest in solidarity with Palestine at a Greek university.
A total of 28 people were arrested by Greek police during the protest and encampment at the Athens Law School on May 14 on charges including disturbing the peace, damaging property, trespass as well as violations of the laws on weapons and flares, all of which they deny.
Of those arrested, the nine UK and EU nationals have been designated as “unwanted aliens” and deemed a threat to public order and national security, facing deportation in an unusual move by authorities.
The group of lawyers representing the nine non-Greek protesters say they will challenge the decision to deport them at their trial in Athens set for Tuesday. In a statement, they asked whether the right of free movement of European citizens “only applies to tourists and investors and is suspended in the case of political action, especially if it concerns Palestine”.
According to them, the arrested protesters are currently being held in the Amygdaleza detention centre just outside Athens in “deplorable conditions” and with “no interpreters”.
In a statement to Al Jazeera, the nine non-Greek detainees said they found themselves suddenly at a deportation processing centre having been told they were being moved to another police station for document checks.
They called the decision to deport them “the heftiest punishment” the state could mete out “for the crime” of being inside a university, adding, “This revealingly fragile and audacious reaction of the Greek state still wanes in its outrageousness when considered in the context of the very reason the university was occupied: genocide.”
In response to the recent arrests and protests at the universities, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of the right-wing New Democracy party, which has been in power since 2019, said on the day of the arrests that the authorities would not allow universities to become sites for protest over Israel’s war on Gaza as has been seen in countries around the world.
In 2019, the Mitsotakis government removed decades-old legislation which previously barred security services from entering university campuses. That law had been established in the wake of a decision by the military dictatorship, which was in power from 1967 to 1974, to violently disband a historic student protest…