CHAPTER 3 The Judiciary Clio Papapantoleon 1/ INTRODUCTION: WHY THE JUDICIARY? In a study published in 2006 under the title Racism and Xenophobia: A Research in the Judiciary and the Police,39 the author, a judge by profession, writes: “the ideologically charged words ‘racism’ and ‘xenophobia’ in the subject of the interview oten seemed to provoke a reaction by the interviewees. They expressed their concern about the a priori ‘racist label’ and, using as a pretext their limited time, oten refused to participate in the interview ... These inhibitory factors were overcome and our approach became easier when the subject focused on the ‘rise in crime’ and the ‘existence of foreigners in Greece the last few years’”. This excerpt is highly telling regarding the agents of social control, and it is true that it could just as equally refer not only to Greek but also to French, German, American, even Danish judges (and police oicers). The Greek judiciary during the last twenty years was asked to deal not only with current issues of regulating everyday private disputes, or with traditional issues of securing a supposedly uniformed collective identity (matters of religion and minorities), but also with a number of new issues: immigration, terrorism, the progressive deregulation of labour relations, Nazi and racist violence, bigotry, increasing social tensions – and, inally, a large part of the population under violent pauperization, as people see themselves rapidly sufering a rapid marginalization from the “productive” social whole and falling suddenly into a fringe until recently reserved in our society exclusively for “Others”. Penal and more generally judicial practices do not just relect constituted cultural models or State choices; nor are they an exact duplicate of such models and choices in a judicial form. They also have an active aspect, a certain selectiveness.40 For instance, never before was Greek criminal justice as anxious to pursue and punish tax crimes as it is today, under pressure from the economic juncture and the State pursuit of revenue and penalization of tax evasion. Regardless of the efectiveness of such intensiied persecution, it is clear that the social message has been well received. In short, judicial action efects a preventive 39. 40. Vagena-Palaiologou 2006: 13. Emmanuelides & Koukoutsaki 2013: 120. MAPPING ULTRA-RIGHT EXTREMISM, XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM WITHIN THE GREEK STATE APPARATUS | 43