“Today we are not discussing any reform, but the enactment of criminal populism.” With this phrase from the beginning of his speech, the president of PASOK-Movement for Change, Nikos Androulakis gave the stamp of his severe criticism of the government regarding the Criminal Codes. “Once again the communication wrap is far from reality. For the umpteenth time in 5 years, your government is amending the Criminal Codes based solely on the needs of the current situation”, noted Mr. Androulakis and emphasized: “It is original for a government that has ruled the country for almost half a decade to appear before public opinion not simply as a bearer of responsibility but also as a supposedly reliable guarantor of the “law and order” doctrine.

As the president of PASOK-KINAL said that “the government, instead of implementing an organized plan to fight crime, horizontally increases the penalties, as if this in itself is enough, to change the image of the complete failure to respond to the citizens’ request for safety. It is your choice that those who are sentenced to more than 2 years, including those who owe money to the public or insurance funds, now go to prison.”

According to Nikos Androulakis “the draft law on the Criminal Codes abolishes and shrinks institutional guarantees and procedures of the criminal trial that have been in place for 100 years, favoring sloppiness and a fast track processing criminal trial”. He pointed out that the observations of 39 law school professors in the country were ignored, underlining: “Many provisions of the draft law raise serious issues of compatibility with the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.”

“Major reforms are not drawn up by a Minister in collaboration with two deputized officials, but by law-preparatory committees”, asserted the president of PASOK-KINAL.

Nikos Androulakis extended his sharp criticism of the degradation of the rule of law, to which he said how the present bill also contributes.

He responded to Mr. Mitsotakis for what he said the day before yesterday in his television interview, accusing him and PASOK of having a plan to cut off resources from Greece. “Therefore, I do not accept any criticism for our faction. But we will not close our eyes to carbine scandals and to everything that affects the rule of law and human rights. No matter how much Mr. Mitsotakis is bothered. Just as we did not cooperate in the government’s use of the Communist Party’s investigative committee to cover up its minister, that is why our MPs left the mock committee yesterday”, underlined the president of PASOK-KINAL and continued: “Put in the drawer the case file of the European public prosecutor’s office on remote control, which is proven that if it had been installed in the railway network we would not have mourned 57 of our fellow human beings”.

Further escalating his attack on the government for the rule of law, he asked: “why are you leaving a window of unpursued criminal infidelity until March 30. Who are you protecting?’

For the independence of the leadership of the judiciary, which, as Mr. Androulakis said, the European Commission has pledged how “PASOK in the upcoming constitutional review will propose to change this! To strengthen the separation of powers and to stop your games with the justice”. “You are a minister of the government that, two years after the revelation of the wiretapping, still the protagonists of the scandal have not been summoned by justice. Isn’t the foreign press writing these things? Don’t MEPs read them?

I say it again: for us, the way of choosing the leadership of the judiciary is a top issue and we will put it in the constitutional revision”, he emphasized, addressing the Minister of Justice, Giorgos Floridis.

He invited him to adopt PASOK’s amendment according to which, for four years after the termination of the service relationship, judicial officials are prohibited from being appointed to public positions of responsibility.

Nikos Androulakis closed his speech by welcoming yesterday’s impressive nationwide rally of farmers at Syntagma

“The tractors entered the center of Athens and left, unfortunately without our farmers finding a reliable interlocutor on behalf of the government. It is your own National Strategic Plan for the CAP, which you wrote and you negotiated in Brussels, that has created all the problems in the primary sector and you are doing nothing to solve them. For PASOK, support for farmers and the primary sector as a whole is not a flag of opportunity. The primary sector is the basis for a productive and outward-looking economy, where tourism will be fully connected to manufacturing and agri-food, as envisioned by PASOK. For us, the support of the agricultural world is a condition for the demographic, social and economic regeneration of the Greek region”, concluded Nikos Androulakis.