With a statement that will be discussed, the well-known lawyer Ilias Christou intervened on the program "Mesimeri kai Kati" on Sigma TV, today Tuesday. In his statement, the lawyer who was invited to speak about tomorrow's continuation of the trial of the four people featured in the infamous Al Jazeera video, asked, among other things, where are the criminal offenses with which the four people will be charged. It was mentioned, in fact, in the recent decision of the Supreme Court, that the witness material of the Police is invalid and cannot be used, as well as that information indicates that the journalists who recorded the report have disappeared and the Police cannot locate them for to appear as witnesses.
Read also: Is the Al Jazeera case in the air? The witness material is invalid by Supreme Decree
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According to the lawyer Ilias Christou, this particular video seems to have violated the rights of the accused in the worst way, as the way in which the witness material was recorded is judged to be unconstitutional. In any private conversation, he says, the communication should be protected, unless the person receiving some kind of attack is at risk, which was not the case. As he characteristically said, "the ones that saw the light of day didn't say anything concrete".
In fact, the well-known lawyer did not fail to open Aiolos' bag for the real culprits of the naturalization program, since as he said "it seems that there was a lot of corruption in this program. Who exactly is responsible and who should be brought to court should be decided by the authorities. Obviously, the right steps have not been taken in this direction. Clearly, justice should not move against both the just and the unjust. Justice must proceed on the basis of legally collected testimony".
He still did not fail to express his doubts about this particular trial as he wondered if it is being conducted for the eyes of the world. "In this trial I'm not sure what the point is, he said. Are we just conducting a trial to conduct it for the world's eyes? he wondered. Are we conducting it to justify the rightful feeling? I haven't realized that. But from what I understand there is no particular testimony to condemn these persons."
He went on to say that “they may be trying to cover up things or people that have nothing to do with this case. My feeling is that others should have been accused and not the particular ones. It sounds like there have been many cases of wrongly issued passports, money was collected from banking institutions and the banks accepted this money. We, as he said, did not see a banker accused, nothing was done against a banking institution in Cyprus, nor developers, nor lawyers who issued passports. There are many who may be accountable, but they did not see the light of day", as he characteristically stated.
He went on to say that "if legal prosecutions are initiated against those who violated the law, they may be held accountable. But in this case I see that things were simply said that should not have been said, which I could call nonsense, but I don't see what the criminal offenses are behind the nonsense. Anyone can open their mouth and say whatever they want. If there is no act to connect what you say, which is the illegal act, then there is no criminal offence. If someone said a stupid thing to be liked, then it does not mean that there is an offense. It is heard that there are criminal offenses committed by many and by very high-ranking persons for which no charges have been brought", said Ilias Christou.