“Chemical castration for rapists of minors should be considered under conditions,” Greece’s Interior Minister Makis Voridis said on Thursday as the country is been shaking with a series of such heinous crimes against minors that pop up in the news almost on a daily basis. The Minister also stressed that “life sentence should be a life sentence” for them and not earlier release on parole.
Speaking to state broadcaster ERT Voridis said that “chemical castration could constitute a mechanism of legal punishment exchange.”
He added that this is applied in foreign countries as a safety measure for the society, in the event that the offender consents to this measure, in order to get out of prison, without having served the entirety of his sentence.
“So tell him that to get you out of prison after you’ve served, say, 20 years, you’ll be eligible for parole after you’ve actually served 6 years, but at 6 to get that right you’ll have accept this medical act,” he said.
Asked if he would be receptive to the introduction of such a measure, the minister replied that “it is something that must be considered”.
Regarding the crimes of pedophilia, Voridis emphasized that pedophiles “in the vast majority are people with a perverted passion, which is very intense and they do not reform.”
Referring to life sentence punishments that end earlier with a parole, Voridis who is a lawyer by profession expressed the view that “there are certain cases of crimes or criminals that, due to either the personality or the heinousness of the act, we could consider that in these cases the full sentence imposed by the court should be served. He should serve the entire sentence, there should not even be beneficial provisions.”
“If you have a terrorist who has killed 17 people and has never repented, why shouldn’t he serve life, spend the rest of his life in prison?” he added.
He stressed that “there should be no legal possibility to judge the issue of conditional release.”
He noted, however, that the Ministry of Justice added conditions to the conditional release, data regarding the dangerousness of the perpetrator, whether he has reformed, data on his personality, the risk of committing new criminal acts.
The Minister said that “society’s demand for an appropriate sentence and as this debate opens up in the public debate, I believe that it will also create thoughts in the Ministry of Justice, in which direction it should move.”
Regarding the rapists of minors, Voridis insisted that in these cases “life sentences should really be life sentences.”
Among the recent cases of minors’ rapes was also the one by a 64-year-old man who raped two children 6 and 8 years old after he was earlier released from prison where he served a sentence for similar crimes.
