With several days delay, Greece’s conservative Health Minister Thanos Plevris went public to criticize his father for Nazi salute inside the courtroom. His father Costas Plevris, a lawyer and well-known Holocaust-denier, was attending as defense lawyer of convicted MEP Giannis Lagos the second instance trial of neo-nazis Golden Dawn last Friday.
The provocative gesture was done in front of Magda Fyssa, the mother of Petros Fyssas, the left-wing rapper who was murdered by a GD member, who was testifying in court.
Speaking to Skai TV on Tuesday morning, Thanos Plevris who is a lawyer by profession said “my father has not hidden his ideology which democracy allows him to have. The salute makes me feel very bad for two reasons, the first that it was done inside the courtroom and the second in front of a woman whose child was murdered by a Nazi. Excuse me, but this is obsolescence.”
Costas Plevris gesture triggered an outrage among the victims’ lawyers, media and social media as it was the second time in less than a week that he saluted in Nazi-style inside the courtroom.
“it is not illegal,” Plevris reportedly said.
Both times, there was no reaction neither by the judge nor the prosecutor.
Lawyers demanded investigation on the matter and demanded that Costa Plevris is expelled from the Athens Bar Association and be dismissed from the court as lawyer of the Golden Dawn.
Following the outrage on October 7, both the judge and the prosecutor said that they did not see it.
Two days later, the Athens Bar Association (DSA) intervened and launched an investigation.
In a statement issued on October 9, the president of the DSA, Dimitris Vervesos, announced that he requested the conduct of a disciplinary preliminary investigation into the specific incident. At the same time he asked the presiding judge and the prosecutor of the First Five-Member Court of Criminal Appeal of Athens to take all actions to deal with such behaviors during the duration of the trial.
He also requested the President of the Disciplinary Councils of the Athens Bar Association to immediate conduct of a preliminary disciplinary investigation into this incident and its correlation with a related pending case for the same conduct, which took place on 28.9.2022, by the same lawyer, before the same Court.