Indicator history

Under the Cypriot legal system, the Attorney General enjoys discretion as to whether to prosecute a person or not and traditionally the Attorney General has demonstrated considerable reluctance in prosecuting assailants for racist crimes. Thus although the legislative framework provides ample authority for prosecuting offenders for racial incidents, the Attorney General will not use these legislative provisions in order to bring charges for racism related offences. In 2005, amidst the climate of nationalism and intolerance created by the rejection of the UN peace plan in 2004, for the first time in decades there were three incidents of racial violence against Turkish-Cypriots, all three of which led to criminal prosecutions but not to any conviction. In two out of the three cases the accused was the same person, who also declared himself to be a member of the nazi organisation Chrysi Avgi (“Golden Dawn”). He was acquitted by the court on the ground that the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt and that any actions of the accused were done in self-defence. This negative precedent of the Court controversially acquitting a blatant assailant has made the prosecution authorities reluctant to prosecute offenders for racial crime; instead a tendency has developed to prosecute for lesser offences (breach of the peace, assault etc) in order to secure convictions (interview with the head of the Police Bureau for Combating Discrimination, recorded in the RAXEN Thematic Study ‘Racist and Related Hate Crimes in Cyprus’ carried out for FRA in September 2010’.) Since the acquittal of the assailant in the aforesaid case, all prosecutions relating to racial attacks are based on charges unrelated to racist motive. Such was also the case of the attack against Turkish Cypriot students at Nicosia’s prestigious English School in November 2006 by far right hooded youth: the charges did not involve racist motive and the Court delivered sentences of a few hours of community work for each assailant.