Romanos’s fate in balance as court rejects his appeal

A Supreme Court prosecutor on Tuesday rejected an appeal by Nikos Romanos for a court ruling rejecting his appeal for study furlough from prison to be revoked, prompting the convicted bank robber and anarchist to threaten to compound his hunger strike, now in its 30th day, with a refusal to drink water.

Vassiliki Papatheodorou, the Supreme Court’s vice president, deemed that the original decision was correct and well-reasoned, and that there were no grounds for it to be revoked.

“One more link to the life of Nikos Romanos has been broken,” the 21-year-old’s lawyer Fragiskos Ragousis responded. He said the decision meant Romanos would continue with his hunger strike and was planning to stop drinking water too unless a bill currently being discussed in Parliament offers a solution. Ragousis added that Romanos would be open to wearing a monitoring bracelet.

In a related development, two former general secretaries of the Justice Ministry, Yiannis Ioannidis and Marinos Skandamis, suggested Greek authorities should make an exception in the case of Romanos.

“However important the distinction of power and the protection of public order may be… all these are canceled if the result to which they lead is the loss of the life of a person struck by a remarkable fate,” they said in a joint statement.