The university police must enter the Greek campuses in Athens and Thessaloniki. But in this country where the university asylum has long been crowned, students and teachers do not always see the measurement of a good eye.
by
“I am in pain, do not shoot me by the head”, shouts a student with an anti -assembly forces who surround him in a video circulating on social networks. In another recording, a young man tackled by a deafening grenade claims to no longer hear. He will be transported with two other people to the hospital. This scene took place in mid-May on the campus of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece. The rector of the Faculty of Sciences decided to end the illegal occupation of a building to transform it into a library. While the work started, men in hood arrived at the entrance to the rector’s office causing the intervention of the police who pulled tear gas. At the same time, a group of students protested against the establishment of a university police was taken to task.
Last year, the Greek Parliament voted for the establishment of a university police when until now the police were authorized to intervene only at the request of the rectorate. “It is not the police who entered universities, but democracy,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in the Assembly. The deputies of the opposition parties, from the center left Kinal to the left Syriza and the Communist Party KKE, had voted against the bill, believing that the police in universities would go against the European principle of self -management of these establishments. For them, this measure is an additional trip to the “security” policy of the conservative government.
The presence of the police in universities is all the more delicate in Greece since the memory of the repression in the blood, in November 1973, by the army and the police of a student movement opposed to the junta of Colonels, at the Polytechnic School of Athens, remains vivid. A Facebook group “No to the Police in Universities” has been collecting the testimonies of opponents for a year for its implementation.
Excessive cost
A petition has been signed by more than 1,000 academics who highlight the excessive cost of this brigade of 20 million euros per year, according to the Greek Treasury, while the annual higher education budget is only 91.6 million euros. Collectives of teachers, researchers and students have even seized the Council of State in the hope that the law will be declared unconstitutional. But in mid-May, the highest Greek legal body judged that the establishment of this special police “did not endanger academic freedom and self-management”.
You have 53.37% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.