Golden Dawn members and supporters at a rally in Athens, Greece on 29 May 2017. Giorgos Georgiou/NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
What is at stake with the Golden Dawn trial?
The Golden Dawn trial, held in Athens, started in April 2015: the “biggest trial of fascist criminality since Nuremberg”, a unique penal trial of 69 defendants, among them 18 members of the Greek Parliament, all elected on the Golden Dawn ticket. The major accusation is based on Article 187 par. 1 of the Greek Criminal Code that defines the nature of a criminal organisation. Besides this, three more serious criminal offenses are also bought before the court: the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, an anti-fascist rapper; an assassination attempt on Abuzid Embarac, an Egyptian worker; and assassination attempts on members of the Greek Communist Party.
The Golden Dawn’s line of defence is not to deny the criminal offenses. Indeed, that would have been irrational since these are undeniable facts. Instead, the objective of the defence is to plead that the perpetrators themselves bear sole responsibility for these crimes and therefore the Golden Dawn leadership is not involved. Yet, paradoxically, two years after Fyssas was assassinated, Nikos Michaloliakos, the leader of Golden Dawn, accepted “the political responsibility of this murder”.
