Evangelos Venizelos: Justice requires consensus and determination

Greek justice as an institutional system can be reformed, but it needs will and consensus to overcome pathologies that date back to the foundation of the new Greek state, the former vice-prime minister and professor at AUTH, Evangelos, underlined closing the proceedings of the two-day conference of the circle of ideas. Venizelos.

“When we talk about justice and the quality of justice, we are talking about the quality of the state, about the quality of every version of the legal order, which includes the economy and the market and civil society. In fact, what we are concerned with is how a nation is constituted and functions and how supranational aggregations such as the European Union are constituted and function. Political aggregation, much broader, is the West and the liberal democracy that are currently under threat”, Mr. Venizelos emphasized and continued.

“It is of great importance, the reform of justice as a power and the awakening of an idea, a claim. The problems faced by the Greek judicial system are genetic problems and they can all be traced back to the first years of the revolution, the palingenesis and the first decades of the formation of the new Greek state, before Kapodistrias and the regency came to Greece. And Kapodistrias and Mauer, who are the main contributors to the infrastructure of the state during the period when the central figure was Alexandros Mavrokordatos. At that time, we have all the problems. The impossibility of establishing and operating courts, the lack of legalization of courts and phenomena so familiar to us, such as the inflation of lawyers”.

“The conference,” said Mr. Venizelos, “wanted to open a dialogue in the context of civil society, without wanting the Circle of Ideas to monopolize this subject, but we always want to act as a catalyst, in order for this national dialogue to be established and to function either formally or informally.

We are fully aware of the complexity of the phenomenon. Greek justice as an institutional system is reformable. But the problematic situations, especially when they are chronic, create a kind of dangerous addiction and, drip by drop, poison the common consciousness, and the special consciousness of the agents of justice with a germ that I would call “oligarchy”. We are all oligarchs while we should be very demanding about how the judicial system should be set up and function. There are chronic conditions that have become entrenched and function as a negative routine. I think we all agree that we need will, not only political but also the will of the institutional actors of justice and of course consensus, not only political and institutional. It requires mental flexibility, practicality and a sense of responsibility. Piecemeal interventions are not enough. A systematic and persistent approach is lacking. A strategy” underlined Mr. Venizelos and concluded.

“It became clear that Greek justice can become more functional, before any ambitious reform is completed.

Justice is the great institutional and great development issue. The judge is asked to perform a very difficult task but he is the guarantor of the rule of law. Society is not a society of law. It is a society that expresses “Bellum omnium contra omnes” (war of all against all), and the rule of law must subordinate society to the legal culture, and that is why it is of great importance that the institutions of the rule of law function.”

RES-EMP

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