Thirty-one year old Thodoris Iliopoulos is the last prisoner of the December 2008 Greek revolt. He has been in pre-trial detention for more than eight months after his arrest on December 18th in downtown Athens.
Thodoris has been charged with felonies on the sole basis of witness accounts of the two riot police who arrested him; this is the only ’evidence’. He went on hunger strike on July 10 demanding his immediate release, after the renewal of his detention for another six months.
Today (August 26), he is in the 48th day of hunger strike and irreversible damage or even death are immediate dangers according to his doctors.
The pre-trial detention of Thodoris Iliopoulos is a punishment, an imprisonment without trial. It is an attempt of the Greek government under Karamanlis, already politically responsible for the murder of the 15 years old Alexis Grigoropoulos by a policeman on December 6th, 2008, to bring Iliopoulos to his physical and psychological limits and finding in him a target for its revanchist rage against the December revolt.
It is also an attempt to present the social struggles as criminal behavior and to construct an ever mightier police state as part of their solution to the current capitalist crisis.
In this case of unjustifiable, arbitrary and revanchist detention even after 48 days of hunger strike, it is where our solidarity is needed the most.
We demand the immediate release of Thodoris Iliopoulos
We demand the withdrawal of all charges against him
We demand the withdrawal of all charges against the participants in the December revolt
We call for actions of solidarity with Thodoris Iliopoulos in Greece and internationally.
OKDE-Spartakos, Greek section of the Fourth International www.okde.org
-OKDE-Spartakos is the Greek section of the Fourth International
Article in International Viewpoint