6th-10th meetings

11th-14th meetings

Meetings from the 6th to the10th of January were dedicated to the most serious objection of the defence politically. This objection has become known as the "objection about political crime". According to the Greek Constitution political offences are tried by Mixed Jury Courts (courts whose juries have a majority of citizens). Further to this, political crimes are the only kind of crime that may be granted amnesty. The defence argued vigorously for the obvious: that 17N was a political group of the extreme left that practised armed violence having chosen this form of political action. Accordingly, all offences of which the defendants are accused, regardless of what each defendant has pleaded, are political offences and therefore the present court has no jurisdiction over this case and is incompetent to try this case.

It should be noted that this particular court was constituted on the base of the "counterterrorist" law that states that offences that are related to "terrorism" are exempted from being tried by Mixed Jury Courts.

This results in the following paradox: a citizen that is accused of homicide is tried by a Mixed Jury Court but on the contrary a citizen that is accused for homicide, that was committed as part of the action of a urban guerrilla group is tried by a special professional court.

The courts ignored the thorough argumentation of the defence and turning a blind eye on the obvious, pronounced that the offences of the 17N group are not political but are simple offences that do not have any particular political background.

During the five day discussion the intervention of Dimitris Koufontinas was remarkable, it was even characterized as a manifesto by the Greek media as was the statement made be Yiannis Rahiotis advocate of Alexandros Yiotopoulos who lowered the tones on the statement he had made during the first trial and declared that his customer disagrees with the action of the 17N group over all the years.

Following the announcement of the decision on the rejection of the objection, Alexandros Yiotopoulos announced he was leaving the trial, without it resigning from his legal means (this probably means he will be resorting to the European Court of Human Rights).

"I will not legalise the predetermined condemnation with my presence ", he declared.

11th-14th meetings

The four next meetings were exceptionally short, since they dealt solely with the compulsory nomination of advocates for Alexandros Yiotopoulos, who, when departing, withdrew the advocates he had initially appointed.

He first two advocates to be appointed by the court denied their nomination, as did three further advocates that were picked from the list of Lawyer's Association in Athens. The court then adopted an illegal process, by which the court actually looked into the attitude of certain lawyers and selecting three who had declared off record that they would accept their nomination. This raised a storm of reactions from the Dimitris Koufontinas and the Hristodoulos Xiros, as well as from their advocates Yianna Kourtovic and Yiorgos Gountoynas. The court, however, went forward with the nomination of the three that had been predetermined and it interrupted for till 19th of January (two weeks) supposedly allowing the new advocates the time to study the case they were introduced to. This is a joke since the material related to the brief has reached 250.000 pages.

On the fringe of trial we had a new slanderous attack on Dimitris Koufontinas by Vassilis Giorgatos.