Kasapidou

The present article follows the introduction of the much-contested “anti-racist legislation” during a particularly dark era of governance in Greece. Within a context of deepening crisis, absolute legitimation of state racism and institutional violence against the nation’s racial, gender, religious and sexual Others, the politico-legal choice of a right-wing government to go through with this reform appears paradoxical at first glance. Even more so, the introduction of gender identity among the protected characteristics seems at odds not only with governmental actions that have directly targeted trans individuals but also with the overall gender-normative imperative of the law and the hostile institutional atmosphere that mirrors and reproduces it. In view of this seemingly paradoxical legislative choice, queried here is the concrete work performed by the “anti-racist law” reform in the context in which it unfolded. Utilising a broader problematisation of any legal regime’s authority to justify its own violence, it is suggested that a closer reading of the conditions under which the reform took place brings into light its instrumentalisation, during that era, to legitimise systemic racism and institutional gender/sexual violence materialised through operations against marginalised populations.

Key words: Hate crime, racist crime, Greece, gender identity, Greek Law 4285/2014, transphobia

Introduction

Political theorist, Paisley Currah (2013), in his work within the area of Trans studies, has contended that a critical understanding of LGBTI-related legislation commands its contextualisation within different state projects or state-level goals enabled by its introduction. Currah rightfully argues that the legal management of gender and sexual identities by the state might take different, often contradictory, forms “which reflect different state projects - recognition, security, surveillance, distribution, reproduction” (Currah 2013: 5). This type of reading of the law, instead of relying on the legislator’s statement about what the law does, seeks an understanding of the work that is performed on different levels by the introduction of “progressive” legislation within specific socio-political surroundings. In keeping with this point, the present article sets out to re-read a much-contested legal reform within the Greek legal order in proximity to the historico-political context that produced it and, more importantly, with regards to the particular work it performed.

Specifically, the article explores the conditions and dominant discourses surrounding the introduction of the “anti-racist legislation” (Law 4139/2013 and later Law 4285/2014), which refers to crimes motivated by the (perceived) characteristics of the victim including race, colour, genealogical background, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability (art. 1 Law 4285/2014). In Greek legislation the terms “hate motivated crime” and later “racist crime” or “crime with racist characteristics” (omitting the affective element of hate on the part of the perpetrator and focusing on the characteristics of the victim) have been used in place of the term “hate crime” that is used internationally. Although, the term “hate crime” does exist in Greek legal theory, it is often replaced with the term “racist crime” both in legislative texts (such as the ones studied here) and the public debates on the issue (Papanikolaou 2016: 1729). Accordingly, the police office responsible to receive hate crime complaints is called Department to Combat Racist Violence and the legislation discussed here is known to the public as the “anti-racist bill/law.”(1)

This legislation was delivered during a period wherein (state) racist discourses and the systematic targeting of the nation’s racial, gender, religious and sexual Others were instrumental tools of governance (Athanasiou 2012; Filippidis 2018). In order to grasp the material and affective components underlying this contradiction, the legislation is framed within the socio-political context of the Greek crisis and its management. The governing regime(2) that enacted the formal protection of marginalised identities can be seen, in the following analysis, to have enforced, at the exact same time, a set of hostile political imperatives that commanded the social and material annihilation of specific populations. This paradoxical condition and its subtler nuances are also discussed in relation to the introduction of gender identity as grounds for protection for the first time. Drawing from my research on gender variance and trans identities in the Greek legal order (Kasapidou 2017, 2020), in this article I examine the role of this protection that appears ambiguous when placed in a context of strict ethno-sexual hierarchies, as well as systemic and systematic racialised and gendered violence.

In view of this, the article allows the space for uncomfortable yet legitimate questions to be raised regarding the conditions under which political forces that institutionally embraced and relied upon racist, sexist and homo/transphobic hostility and violence introduced this legislation not against but as part of the strategic precarisation of populations on a state and suprastate level. It traces the reform’s particular workings, pointing towards a critical reading of the “anti-racist legislation” as a means to re-name and re-legitimise the intensifying Greek (and European) state racism and institutional violence through an instrumentalisation of the concept and rhetorics of “racist crime”.

The End of the World as We Know it

More than a decade since the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and its aftermath, it has become rather tiresome to try capturing the Greek crisis in a few words, whether for academic or other reasons. What is crucial for, even vaguely, comprehending this period is that the term “crisis” has come to include, other than the financial crisis itself, the devastating effects of the management of the crisis and, eventually, more than one crisis (the debt crisis, the “refugee crisis”, the legitimation crisis of political parties and so on).(3) A few of the instances marking the last decade are the collapse of the decades long political regime, the IMF intervention, dramatic austerisation, multiplying percentages of unemployment, thousands of unaccounted for deaths along the country’s borders, militarised police operations against anomie, a surge in racist violence and the election of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in the Parliament. Greek commentators have repeatedly noted that, as impressive as the quantitative and statistical representation of the last decade of austerity might be, it proves insufficient to describe the catholic nature of its political, financial, social and emotional effect on a ground level (Tsilimpounidi 2016: 2; Roufos 2018; Vaiou 2014). With capital destruction climbing to levels equal to those faced by European countries after World War II and no part of life in Greece left untouched by the shifting conditions, the crisis early on “forcefully illustrated how it would shake to the ground our world as we knew it” (Brekke, Filippidis & Vradis 2018: 13; Roufos 2018).

By 2010, the first memorandum(4) had been signed and, while the crisis was deepening, the period 2008-2012 was also marked by the rise of social movements that were resisting austerity and cultivating a radical culture of political organisation (Bratsis 2010; Vradis & Dalakoglou 2011; Arampatzi & Nicholls 2012; Leontidou 2012; Tsilimpounidi & Walsh 2014; Athanasiou 2014). Following the polymorphous political mobilisations that made Greece a focus point for the European and global Left, a new dogma of public order and security started materialising through extreme policing techniques and militarised repressive operations (Dalakoglou 2013; Kotouza 2018; Filippidis 2018). The perpetually re-constructed state of emergency became the discursive vehicle for the introduction of the dogma of “zero tolerance” that became central in the dismantling of political movements, the battling of civil disobedience, the securitisation of public space and the biopolitical management of migrant populations (Athanasiou 2012; Filippidis 2018). This new national narrative eventually shaped into a set of discourses and ideological apparatuses that, in turn, materialised in various settings. That is, more than a fiscal impasse and an occasion for structural reform, the crisis became a political paradigm and an ideological framework that drastically reconfigured socio-political conditions (Athanasiou 2012; Brekke, Filippidis & Vradis 2018).

Other than state policing and anti-migrant operations, 2012 brought an amplification of street-level racist violence but also a broad legitimisation of its mainstream political expression. Golden Dawn was elected in the parliament and went from a small, militaristic, neo-Nazi faction to being recognised as a socially accepted power of parliamentary and street-level politics (Dalakoglou 2013; Ellinas 2013; Athanasiou 2014; Psarras 2015). The increasing flows of people arriving along the south and east borders of the country were used as pretext for the transformation of an openly anti-migrant sentiment into everyday violence.(5) During 2012-2014 and building upon the previous year’s violent legacy,(6) paramilitary groups of Golden Dawn patrolled specific areas of Athens. This routine included “cleansing” neighbourhoods of migrants, destroying non-Greek-owned shops, raiding houses and unofficial mosques, terrorising migrants through violent – sometimes even lethal – assaults (Human Rights Watch 2012; Dalakoglou 2013, Jail Golden Dawn 2014a; Carastathis 2015, Brekke 2018).(7) At the same time, the state launched a series of anti-migrant operations with the largest one being the – staggering in its size and violence – operation “Xenios Zeus” that will be further discussed later (Filippidis 2018).

Right-wing street-level and institutional racist violence on such a massive scale were legitimised through a variety of overlapping discourses concerning internal and external threats to the state’s sovereignty and the nation’s health and homogeneity (Athanasiou 2012). As feminist and other critiques have demonstrated, such violence and precarity were distributed along (among others) the axes of race, gender, sexuality and national belonging, thus, producing intersections of intensified vulnerability (Athanasiou 2012, 2014; Vaiou 2014, 2016; Carastathis 2015; 2018a; Tsilimpounidi 2016; Filippidis 2018). Racist, sexist and homo/transphobic rhetorics and practices flourished while their relationship with the crisis was presented as causal, transferring the responsibility to those who were deemed as a threat to the national body (Athanasiou 2012; Carastathis 2015). Moral panics and hostile discourses towards racial and gender “Others” became entangled with the technocratic crisis management in ideological formations that legitimised the “reinvigorated routine of national masculinity” as a means of protection and resistance against internal and external threats (Athanasiou 2012: 38; Carastathis 2015; Papanikolaou 2018).

At the same time, the conditions of existence of LGBTI+ and queer politics started changing at an accelerated pace. That is, simultaneously with the unfolding of the crisis and the rapid worsening of material conditions, ran a parallel process of LGBTI+ visibility in new terms (Papanikolaou 2018). While the political generation of LGBTI+ and queer groups of the period 2000-2010 was characterised by the effort to claim legitimisation and space within social movements and the public sphere, these dynamics gradually started changing alongside the shifts in broader political dynamics (Marinoudi 2017). The eruption of social movements and, later on, the emergence of NGOs and other civil society actors, partly due to the “humanitarian crisis,” were rapidly transforming LGBTI+ politics and its place in the national political agenda. Moreover, new digital media platforms and the international cultural and political currency of LGBTI+ and queer identities had opened up a vast horizon of possibilities. In this time of proliferation of NGOs on a national level (Theofilopoulos 2018), the transnational mobilisation of policy-oriented Greek LGBTI+ groups and the channelling of funds and institutional support towards LGBTI+ issues on a European level formed a new political terrain.(8) The gradual inclusion of some LGBTI+ issues in the parliamentary political agenda was to a large degree enabled by the European institutional common ground of perceiving LGBTI-related legislation as a mark of “progress” and an obligation for states that are (or want to become) European (Kulpa [2011] 2016; Stychin 2003; Binnie 2004; Kahlina 2015).(9) Overall, other than the space that was being established through political action and social presence, LGBTI+ groups started to claim a new role as lobbying agents within law-making procedures taking the first steps into a more professionalised kind of politics.

This means that in a complex collusion of socio-political currents, LGBTI+ politics slowly started to be institutionalised and included in the mainstream political and legislative arena while, at the exact same time, the grim political conditions were becoming fertile ground for a revitalisation of gendered violence and a renewed investment in gender hierarchies that contested the articulation of LGBTI+, queer and feminist politics (Athanasiou 2012; Vaiou 2016; Papanikolaou 2018).(10) Dimitris Papanikolaou situates this collusion within a global fragmented tale of “progress” in which LGBTI+ legislation and recognition are granted “yet, in a parallel development, and often in the very same ‘locations’, homophobic, ethnophallocentric and homonationalist apparatuses work to undo, sometimes in spectacular ways, these achievements” (Papanikolaou 2018: 170). It is precisely the recognition of such a “parallel development” that demands a critical reading of the law; that is, an interrogation of the work performed along and through the introduction of a piece of “progressive” legislation, such as the legislation against “racist crime,” in the specific historico-political context that enabled and enclosed it. But first, let us trace how this reform came to be and what it pertained to.

“Racist Crime”

It was within the above-described turbulent era of violence, precarity and dispossession, but also intense socio-political mobilisation, that a reform of the Greek “anti-racist legislation” was initiated. In 2011 and with anti-migrant violence on the rise, the Racist Violence Recording Network (RVRN) was founded as an initiative of the National Commission for Human Rights and the UNHCR-Greece with the participation of various NGOs and other institutions.(11) Furthermore, by 2012, the mainly right-wing governing coalition was faced with international pressures concerning the rise of Golden Dawn and the unprecedented surge of violence that was bringing negative attention from international press and European institutions.(12) In response, the government attempted to strengthen the legal framework concerning the criminal prosecution of hate crimes. Specifically, Law 4139/2013 amended article 79 of the Criminal Code according to which the commission of crimes motivated by hate towards specific characteristics constituted aggravating circumstances and, under the amended provision, the threatened penalties could not be suspended (Fountedaki 2014). It is worth noting that the term “gender identity” (ταυτότηταφύλου), as such, was introduced for the first time in the Greek legal order as a protected characteristic under this law, initiating, at least in theory, a different era regarding the legal protection of trans individuals.(13)

Following the passage of Law 4139/2013, the undisrupted increase in violent attacks (including stabbings, arsons, etc.) towards marginalised groups amplified the international outcry over the lack of prosecution of such attacks and, especially, of the activities of Golden Dawn. In January 2013, the murder of Shehzad Luqman, who was targeted on his way to work by supporters of Golden Dawn due to his migrant origin, brought some publicity to the reality of – usually unresolved and often unprosecuted – murders of migrants in Athens during that period (Jail Golden Dawn 2013; Enet English 2014; Jail Golden Dawn n.d.). Following the murder of Luqman and its aftermath, the Department to Combat Racist Violence was established within the Hellenic Police as well as a hotline for complaints. Only a few months later, the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a Golden Dawn supporter shook public opinion once more (Jail Golden Dawn 2015). The murder of a Greek citizen and a militant anti-fascist resonated differently with social and political actors compared to years of anti-migrant violence, mobilising more intense protests on a national and international level (Carastathis 2015).

This moment was the turning point at which the Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection (N. Dendias) forwarded to the public prosecutor a file including several cases of similar attacks which implicated Golden Dawn members, thus instigating the criminal investigation that led to the arrest of the party’s MPs for organised criminal activity (Psarras 2015). Even after the initiation of the monumental judicial process against Golden Dawn in 2013,(14) the further strengthening of the legal framework against “racist crime” remained a strongly articulated demand of international actors as well as the national left-wing forces.(15) Therefore, the government was forced to renegotiate the introduction of what was widely known as the “anti-racist bill” (αντιρατσιστικό νομοσχέδιο) that had already been postponed in the past. The public debate concerning the “anti-racist legislation” was, since the beginning, a battlefield and the political crisis woven around it was so severe that its introduction to the Parliament for voting was postponed several times, extending the entire procedure over more than two years (Meliggonis 2013; Kitsantonis 2013; Sotiropoulos 2014).

The public debate concerning the “anti-racist bill” was largely formed around the resistance on the part of Golden Dawn and other conservative forces (Zoulas 2014). Other than the overall anti-migrant stance of several political forces, two of the main points of conflict around which the political opposition to the bill was framed were the intention to supposedly protect homosexuality (by including sexual orientation and gender identity in the protected characteristics) and the criminalisation of the denial of the Holocaust, war crimes and genocide – specifically whether particular historical instances of mass violence that have been recognised by the Greek Parliament as genocides (such as the systematic killing and exile of Christian populations by the Ottoman Empire) would be considered as legally recognised genocides and thus protected under the purview of this law. Hence, racist, homophobic, anti-Turkish and anti-Semitic discourses simultaneously flooded the public debate over the suggested legislation, adding to the systematic and systemic violence of this period. Finally, the bill passed after intensifying political pressure and only in the aftermath of a government scandal including the ruling party (Nea Dimokratia) and Golden Dawn members, which basically exemplified the deep political ties between the two parties and several of their members (Psarras 2015: 33).(16)

The resulting law, Law 4285/2014, was adopted in order to transpose the European Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law. It replaced article 79 of the Criminal Code with article 81A, thus providing a new legislative framework wherein “racist crime”(17) constitutes a crime of its own (hence the separate article) instead of just an aggravating circumstance (Voulgaris 2015; Symeonidou-Kastanidou 2016; Chalkia 2016). The revised provision rendered more severe minimum penalties for what are characterised as “racist crimes” while maintaining sexual orientation and gender identity among the protected grounds. Moreover, article 1 of the same law criminalised incitement to acts of discrimination, hatred or violence (but not hate speech per se), an issue that has given rise to debates concerning free speech.(18) Law 4285/2014 also provided for the liability of legal persons or groups of persons, thus providing legal protection from unities such as political parties (article 5) as well as threatening harsher penalties in cases of such crimes committed by public officials or employees (article 1). That was considered important to the extent that the public comments that fall under the purview of this provision were often made on the part of politicians and clerics (ECRI 2015).(19)

Overall, the introduction of the new legislation against “racist crimes” touched upon the very heart of the on-going political conflicts within Greek society and was placed at centre stage of the national political agenda from the outset of its negotiation. More importantly it posed, in the clearest of ways, questions concerning the way “progressive” legislation should be read in specific historico-political settings. In this direction, the next part will exemplify some of the ways the political imperatives of the specific regime crystallised on the ground through various state apparatuses and ideological discourses. By analysing concrete instances of governance, it will sketch out the state agenda of that time and the centrality of racist and sexist violence within it, thus marking the choice of that particular government to fortify the legislation against “racist crime” as paradoxical at first glance. In this sense, the following section is a rather significant parenthesis that serves to demonstrate what kind of political forces introduced this legislation into the Greek legal order and why that raises legitimate questions. It serves, that is, to complicate and ground, politically and even affectively, the analysis of “anti-racist legislation” within its context and to start drawing lines between hostile political imperatives, racialised as well as gendered violence and “progressive” legislation.

In Parenthesis

In 2012 and during a period of intense political instability in Greece, the provisional coalition government of Nea Dimokratia/PASOK/LAOS launched a series of nightmarish “cleansing” operations against the “infectious” bodies of racial/gender/sexual/national Others under the orders of the Minister of Health, Andreas Loverdos (Mavroudi 2013). Loverdos, a Constitutional Law expert himself, as Minister of Health had been strategically fleshing out for months the figure of the “illegal immigrant” as a threat to public health, infamously known in public opinion as a “hygienic bomb” (Filippidis 2018: 79-82). Furthermore, the Minister of Health had gone one step further in gendering this discourse by declaring, against all statistical evidence, that female migrant sex-workers of African origin were spreading HIV within Greek society and should thus be deported (Athanasiou 2012: 31, Mavroudi 2013). As Filippidis notes:

After cultivating for several months racially oriented fear in its purest form (that which involves physically invasive and biologically infectious Others), Loverdos, in a joint press conference with the Minister of Public Order, Michalis Chrysohoidis, announced the compulsory hygienic examination of migrant populations following all possible procedural and discursive routes that could imply urgency (Filippidis 2018: 82-83). Sowing panic and reaping legitimation, Loverdos introduced on the same day the notorious Public Health Decree 39A, which included provisions introducing forceful hygienic controls on migrant populations, the construction of migrant detention camps, health requirements for private houses used by migrants, a health certificate issued for migrants and other similar regulations.(20)

This became the legal ground for the collaboration of public health and police authorities in a medico-legal mechanism of population control that expanded from detention centres along the territorial borders of the country to the very centre of Athens and all the way into the supposedly private space of migrant residences (Filippidis 2018). Moreover, it became an additional political ground for the intensification of racialised daily violence and the fortification of (state and other) discourses of racism in its primordial form, that of biology. Through this nosology lexicon, that is, through “the return to the political anatomy of the body: the governing of the body in danger and the governing of the dangerous body”, medicalised racism and the overall medicalisation of the crisis itself were established as a dominant governance paradigm (Athanasiou 2012: 45).

Having set the ground for the exemplary “biological enemy within”, that is, female, African, allegedly seropositive sex-workers, Loverdos orchestrated in the eyes of the public the worst-case scenario for the national body (Filippidis 2018: 82). A few days before the crucial national elections of 2012, in a police-hygienic operation that came in waves, hundreds of female alleged sex-workers were rounded up on the streets of Athens and forcibly tested for HIV (Mavroudi 2013). Held under gruesome conditions, the women were tested (using what is called “rapid tests”) without or against their consent in various locations such as vans or police cells. The outcome was blurted out to them in the presence of the police or by the police themselves (Mavroudi 2013).(21) Those found seropositive were arrested and prosecuted under the charges of illegal prostitution and serial grievous bodily harm with intent, combined with serial attempts of the same act; a felony charge that led to their pre-trial imprisonment without any evidence other than seropositivity, which can hence be claimed to have been openly criminalised (Mavroudi 2013; Gkresta & Mireanu 2016). The state prosecutor, in collaboration with the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ΚΕΕΛΠΝΟ), ordered the publication of their photographs and personal information in the name of the Greek family and public health and, more specifically, to “protect the Greek family men” who might have been in contact with them (Psarra 2012a; Athanasiou 2012; Mavroudi 2013; Gkresta & Mireanu 2016).
In a general atmosphere of emergency, the Minister announced to the Greek society the verification of his gruesome prophecy:

After every sweep, the photographs of the newly arrested women would be displayed in the media in an atmosphere of cultivated “terror” along with hotline numbers available for the “Greek family men” who were the imaginary collective victim of the crime for which the women were being persecuted.(22) The media led an extreme ethico-hygienic panic campaign using the mugshots of the women, who found themselves at the centre of an emblematic moment of biopolitical regulation through a race- and gender-informed nosology (Athanasiou 2012).(23)

In reality, none of the seropositive women arrested in the whole series of operations was of African origin but the majority were Greek nationals and often users of intravenous illegal substances (Mavroudi 2013). Filippidis (2018) notes:

Indeed, the racist and anti-migrant elements of this debate were not in any way mitigated by the fact that the hypothesis of the Minister about African seropositive sex-workers was actually disproved by the outcome of the operation. On the contrary, the entire operation was considered a success, leading to the re-election of Nea Dimokratia and, specifically, of the politicians involved. Namely, this operation formed part of the Greek State’s “continuous war on undocumented immigration” (Gkresta & Mireanu 2016: 228) in which “these particular women lent momentarily their face to the necessary, in view of the elections, internal enemy” (Psarra 2012b). The seropositive persecuted women became the metonym of the infectious Other for the Greek state, media and society who were invested in their social death (Athanasiou 2012).

As mentioned earlier, the “triumph” of this operation on the communicational front assisted in the re-election of the politicians involved and, most importantly, of Nea Dimokratia who, relying on the social acceptance of its anti-migrant agenda, formed a new coalition government (Nea Dimokratia, PASOK and the Democratic Left) and, only a couple of months later, launched one of the most massive operations of population control in modern Greek history. This pogrom-like operation, officially named Xenios Zeus (Hospitable Zeus), was initiated in August 2012 and amounted (among other things) to a series of police raids in public and private spaces (including houses) that radically changed Athens as a city. The extent of the operation itself is difficult to conceive:

During that period, Athens became an atrocity playground for the Hellenic Police which, along with Golden Dawn battalions, indulged in a racist power trip that included racial profiling, physical violence, torture, disappearances, extortion, illegal detention and other similar practices (Human Rights Watch 2012; Human Rights Watch 2013; Amnesty International 2013; Crisis-scape website; Simeio website; valtousX website).(24)

Although the operation was targeted towards migrant populations, the normalisation of this control regime, as shown by the persecution of the seropositive women, was largely invested in “(re)constructing national identity and national integrity” against and through all Others in racial, gender, sexual, religious and other terms (Filippidis 2018: 79; Athanasiou 2012). In this sense, the concept of the enemy within was broadened in order to “include all vulnerable social groups (migrant men/women, homeless men/women, drug users, trans people, male sex-workers, female sex-workers), as it [was] exemplified by the mass arrests taking place on an almost daily basis” (Protovoulia Allileggyis Diokomenon Orothetikon Gynaikon 2012). What becomes clear is that whether in the case of the persecuted seropositive women in Athens or in the case of the Xenios Zeus operation, the construction of Other bodies as infectious and, thus, dangerous for the national body, legitimised (and was legitimised by) state practices that were informed and relied upon discourses of racist, sexist and heteronormative dominance. In that context, as it has been demonstrated, the “anti-racist legislation” was introduced by and within an institutional order wherein nosological discourses, state racism and gender abjection were clearly crucial instruments of governance, that is, not only for the ideological re-legitimisation of national(ist) values and state sovereignty but also for managing populations and distributing socio-fiscal precarity (Athanasiou 2012: 31).

In other words, this section goes to show precisely which government, and in which historical moment, graced (even unenthusiastically) vulnerable groups with legal protection against “racist crimes” and why that raises various questions. One of the issues I want to pursue here pertains to the introduction of gender identity among the protected characteristics and the manner in which such a gesture can (or cannot) resonate with the conditions of transphobia and hetero-sexist violence within the national context. Specifically, I want to explore the juxtaposition between the legislative enunciation of gender identity protection and the strict gender normative imperative of the Greek institutional order; an imperative that might be crystallised in concrete institutional actions but is equally present even when not explicitly evoked, thus creating an environment that is overall inhospitable.

Protecting Gender Identity

In a context of intensifying violence, the “anti-racist legislation” was picked up, soon after its enactment, by LGBTI+ lobbying groups in an attempt to produce litigation concerning high publicity cases of homophobic and transphobic speech. To that end, various activists and NGOs attempted to use the new provisions to mobilise judicially against state and para-state actors, mainly on the grounds of public incitement of hatred and violence (Dimitras 2017). Moreover, the introduction of structures for reporting “racist crime” led to a small number of individual complaints for violent attacks and other similar incidents (RVRN 2013, 2014).(25) The judicial outcome of such cases was usually disappointing, as described in the joint submission made to the prosecutor of the highest Greek court (Areios Pagos) by the Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM), Athens Pride and Thessaloniki Pride, arguing a systematic lack of prosecution of homophobic crimes regardless of the existing legislation (Dimitras 2017).(26) The GHM, the Minority Rights Group-Greece (MRG-G) and the Coordinated Organisations and Communities for Roma Human Rights in Greece (SOKADRE), in a submission to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), made similar arguments about the non-application of the “anti-racist legislation” regarding various affected groups (Tsarnas 2017). Both documents include incidents wherein Orthodox Church representatives, politicians, the Hellenic Police, prosecuting authorities and other institutions (civil courts among them) have engaged in behaviour that was blatantly in violation of the “anti-racist legislation”. Nonetheless, most of these cases either failed to be prosecuted or their prosecution was discontinued (“archived”) by the authorities, or they were dismissed in court.(27)

What is epitomised by the cases included in these documents is something that can be considered common knowledge, especially among marginalised groups in Greece. That is, that state and para-state actors have a central role in establishing and perpetuating racialised and gendered violence and hostility within Greek society, a fact that is turned on its head by the logic of the discussed legislation, which relies on state institutions for countering the violence they exemplify. Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis in States of Injury echoes here to the extent that she has insightfully traced the processes of de-politicisation and individualisation that allow (neo)liberal states to appear as defenders of injured individuals against social injustices, which nonetheless are a sine qua non for the very existence and flourishing of these states.(28) In this sense, focusing on interpersonal violence and directing blame for gender related violence onto “bad” individuals who, in turn, are punished by neutral state mechanisms, works to obscure their own role in the perpetuation of this very violence. Indeed, critical approaches to hate crime legislation and other similar legal concepts have pointed out that the investment in punitive mechanisms and the focus solely on interpersonal harm does not work towards undoing social injustices and challenging the broader socio-political conditions that encourage and enable the violence addressed by such legislation (Conrad 2012; Spade [2009] 2015; Lamble 2013; Boukli & Renz 2018).

Although these critiques of the effectiveness of hate crime laws are pertinent and the politico-legal debates they stem from are crucial, my aim here is not to critique the concept of hate crime in principle. Neither is it to re-state the above-mentioned rightful complaints about the lack of application and effectiveness of this specific law within the Greek legal order. Somewhere between those lines of critique, I want to follow the threads that connect concrete judicial practices, dominant ideological imperatives and political strategies as they are showcased in this reform. To that end, insights from my empirical research are summoned here to serve as a departing point to further nuance our understanding of the way this legislative framework intertwines with complex political processes in the core of neoliberal ideological constructions.

The research from which the present article draws revolved around the various entanglements, impasses and strategies vis-à-vis gender variance and the law within the Greek legal order (Kasapidou 2017, 2020).(29) For the empirical part of this research, I conducted a small number of interviews with trans individuals focusing on their interaction with the law and the ways in which the Greek legal order can be navigated.(30) Discussing the effects of this specific piece of legislation with my interlocutors, we engaged with the concept of legal protection from “racist crime” and specifically from its transphobic aspect. What seemed to be a common ground was that there is undeniably something produced, even if only on a symbolic level, by having your identity enunciated by the legislator and protected, even if only on a theoretical level, by the law. The very recent memory of homophobic (let alone transphobic) violence not existing as a legally intelligible concept in Greece speaks volumes to the effects of complete legal and official illegitimacy (Boukli 2009). At the same time, the conviction that state authorities are fundamentally hostile, hence making this concept of legal protection unfeasible, was equally common ground. Our discussions thus kept going around in circles, not so much reaching a definite conclusion but more furthering an aporetic engagement with a legal framework whose role seemed rather ambiguous.

Responding to my questions whether they have or would consider utilising such a law and how they appraise its effects, my interlocutors kept going back and forth in describing the “anti-racist law”, on one hand, as necessary and potentially effective in altering (even if slightly) social conditions (“a tool” or in another case “a window”) and, one the other hand, as futile or even decorative (“a law like a piece of jewellery, an earring”) (Kasapidou 2020: 229-232). Contemplating the potential of such recognition on a social, penal and even affective level, our discussions led us to engage with the law’s politics of hope, as Beger describes it, and to entertain the promise of the law to “teach the nation respect, forcing them to acknowledge and protect individual expression” (Beger [2004] 2009: 113). This engagement, nonetheless, was always momentary and self-refuting. It persisted in valuing the law and undermining it at the same time. What is important here is not to read this ambivalence as an expression of personal indecisiveness but as an accurate understanding of the paradox that is the accelerated granting of minority rights in a (neo)liberal reality of normalised violence, precarity and injustice (Papanikolaou 2018).

Within this ambivalent engagement what also emerged was a plethora of obstacles and parameters (such as the restricted access of the most vulnerable populations to such legal remedies) to be taken into account when faced with structural and systemic inequalities and their supposedly straightforward legal solutions (Spade [2009] 2015; Beger [2004] 2009). This, of course, ties in with the empirically well-grounded suspicion against the “inexplicable” gesture of the government to formally grant protection to groups of people that were, at the same time, systematically marginalised by it. Particularly, the scepticism towards state institutions, police and judicial authorities, which have a long legacy of enforcing their ethno-sexual imperatives by any means necessary, can be read, in the light of the previous sections, as an intimate knowledge of how “economies of hostility”(31) work on an everyday level (Carastathis 2015; 2018b). Another example of such knowledge can be found in one of these discussions wherein one of my interlocutors hinted towards a schema within which the victims protected by the “anti-racist legislation” not only need to be recognised as protection-worthy (rights-bearing, legally legible and law-abiding citizens) but also as socially respectable, as “proper” citizens. The picture she painted marks the intertwining of transphobia, (trans)misogyny, racism and perceived respectability. Although such an intertwining can be easily fathomed within the socio-political terrain described earlier in the article, let us make some connections more concrete here.

In the summer of 2012, during the nightmarish police operations against alleged sex workers described in the previous section, several trans women perceived as sex workers were detained in the centre of Athens and forcibly tested for HIV in a gender-normative conceptual framework of moral-hygienic abjection (Greek Transgender Support Association 2012). As none of them was found to be seropositive, they were released and did not suffer the full extent of social and legal annihilation reserved for the seropositive women. With this legacy and within a similar context of urban cleansing, in May of 2013, more trans women – perceived without any proof to be sex-workers – were targeted and detained on different occasions in the city of Thessaloniki (Greek Transgender Support Association 2013a, 2013b; Galanou 2013). As made clear by the reply of the Minister of Citizen Protection, Nikos Dendias, to three related parliamentary questions (Parliamentary questions no 11381/4.6.2013, 11551/6.6.2013 and 11530/6.6.2013), the targeting of these women was part of a police “Special Operational Action Plan” of the public authorities (Document No 7017/4/16499). This plan aimed to “improve the image” of some areas of the city and “tackle, among others, prostitution and exploitation of the sexual life of socially and economically vulnerable individuals, to enhance citizens’ feeling of safety and to improve the image of the above mentioned areas” (Dendias quoted in TGEU 2013). This statement, which was repeatedly protested by various political agents, confirmed the obvious; that these women were “persecuted and prosecuted by governmental authorities on the basis of their gender identity”, which was implicitly considered in itself proof of illegal sex-work and, thus, indirectly criminalised (Bouklis 2013).

This operation continued throughout the summer of 2013 with police harassment and hours-long detention becoming a daily routine for many trans women in Thessaloniki, some of which were repeatedly picked up and mistreated. With the support of the Greek Transgender Support Association and after the reaction of several political collectivities, NGOs and other actors, some of the women decided to file a group lawsuit based on their targeting and mistreatment (Greek Transgender Support Association 2015). A separate but related lawsuit regarding her own mistreatment was filed by the lawyer representing them, who, during one of the arbitrary detentions was repeatedly denied contact with her client and was finally illegally held as well (Greek Transgender Support Association 2017). In 2015 both lawsuits were discontinued as, after a Sworn Administrative Inquiry, the public prosecutor of Thessaloniki considered the entire operation to have been properly conducted (Greek Transgender Support Association 2015).(32) This is indicative of the perpetuation of the aforementioned “economies of hostility” (Carastathis 2015) by legal actors on an institutional level. Certainly it was Minister Dendias who, as a politician, provided the discursive and political framework for this operation, but as will become obvious, judicial authorities play an equally crucial part in the cultivation of institutional hostility and the safeguarding of ethno-sexual imperatives.(33)

Let us recall here that, as noted earlier, gender identity had been introduced as a ground for protection from “racist crime” under the Greek Penal Code with Law 4139/2013. Its passage took place in March 2013, that is, just two months before the operation in Thessaloniki commenced. Undoubtedly, this operation and its judicial handling constituted a direct targeting of individuals on the grounds of gender identity by the very authorities enunciating the prohibition of targeting individuals on the grounds of gender identity. The point here is not to exclaim in the face of such a paradox, but to return to what has already become obvious in the discussion of Xenios Zeus and the HIV-related raids: that the intensification of gendered and racialised hierarchies have been instrumental to the materialisation of state projects such as, in this case, crisis management, austerity politics and nation (re)building – not so much, as Anna Carastathis notes, as a causal relationship within which Greece became racist and ethno-phallocentric due to the crisis, but as a way to secure the politics of repression and austerity through and along the political and affective economies of race and gender hierarchies (Carastathis 2015).

It is equally crucial to perceive these instances of institutional transphobia as part of an overall atmosphere within which transness exists in the Greek institutional context, rather than as spatio-temporally confined eruptions within an otherwise non-transhpobic environment (Carastathis 2018a). As striking as these events might appear, framing them as disruptive and, in this sense, disconnected from – or even contra – the Greek legal order might prove misleading and in a sense complicit in allowing their socio-political backdrop to present as somehow neutral; in a sense, to disappear. Sara Ahmed (2012), in her work on racism in institutional life, engages with the “labor in attending to what recedes from view” and, in that sense, makes visible what is ever-present for some but unacknowledged by others; ever-present for some also because it is unacknowledged by others (Ahmed 2012: 14). Ahmed, in reference to institutionalised racism, describes whiteness as a kind of surrounding, something that is just around, but also, following Frantz Fanon, she conceptualises racism as “an atmosphere around a black body” (Ahmed 2014). “An atmosphere”, Ahmed tells us, “can be how a body is stopped, how some are barred from entry or stopped from staying” and in that sense is a strategy for socially (and institutionally) imposing who is unwanted, not necessarily by declaring so, but nonetheless by making inhibiting a space unbearable or simply more difficult (Ahmed 2014). Ahmed’s (2012, 2014) argument is not employed here to achieve a race-gender analogy but to offer a way of fathoming the qualities that compose an a priori non-hospitable (or even unbearable) environment for some while making it appear neutral, or even hospitable, for others. Her methodological grace in describing what recedes from view allows (at least an attempt) to grasp the atmospheric qualities that render the Greek institutional order deeply and inherently homo/transphobic as well as racist and sexist regardless of its unenthusiastic legislative declarations of the opposite.

Understanding transphobia and gendered violence as a kind of surrounding provides a framework within which ambivalence towards a narrower conceptualisation of these notions and their materialisation should not just be expected but also welcomed. Regarding violence specifically, Carastathis (2018a), drawing from feminist of colour and transfeminist theories, establishes an understanding of homo/transphobic violence in modern Greece as atmospheric. According to Carastathis, the dominant model of engagement with gender-related violence is based on a perception of violence as constituted by events or incidents with clear spatio-temporal limits that allow us to map out the experience of violence by describing, charting and condemning such events (Carastathis 2018a). This way, violence is reduced to the exceptionality of the event which constitutes a “dysfunctional exception” that disrupts a smooth and non-violent normality (Carastathis 2018a: 6). This conceptualisation, even when it implies or recognises the ever-presence of violence, does so in quantitative terms that suggest this ever-presence is the sum of increasing numbers of such incidents. Nonetheless, as Carastathis notes, the difference between understanding violence as incidental or atmospheric is more than a matter of proportions. The difference between the two approaches is that “the dominant, incidental approach treats gendered violence in epidemiological terms as outbursts of a disease, within a social body that is, besides that, healthy” (Carastathis 2018a: 9). Although Carastathis makes this point with broader epistemological – and not specifically legal – convictions in mind, it is valuable in the process of conceptualising the Greek legal order as an inherently and pervasively gender-normative environment.

In one of his 1977-78 lectures at the College de France, Michel Foucault, suggests – tracing this critique back to Kelsenian thought – that there is a fundamental relationship between law and the norm that underlies it (Foucault 2003: 55). Departing from the position that “every system of law is related to a system of norms”, Foucault argues that the law refers to a set of norms, to which it offers a kind of codification (Foucault 2003: 55). Indeed, mirroring and reproducing the canon of Helleno-Orthodoxy,(34) which constitutes the backbone of the Greek national identity, the Greek legal order bears deep within it the interconnection of gender/sexual normativity with national belonging, reproductive futurity and xenophobic (as well as Islamophobic) sentiment. Traditionally, throughout the core texts of Greek Civil and Penal Law, gender variance as well as sexuality (as a whole but even more so practices that are not included in reproductive heterosexuality), have been faced with an inherent “negativism” (Vitoros 2008). This has provided a historical legal basis for the fusion of moral, natural and legal “deviation” within the Greek legal tradition (Vitoros 2008; Apostolidou 2014). Regardless of the increasing number of legislative texts that adopt the lexicon against discrimination, this is a legal culture riddled with strict hierarchies (in national, sexual, gender, religious and other terms) and an institutional environment built to host the “Greek Family Man” and his heirs.(35) In this environment, a wall of institutional hostility or non-legibility is raised against all Others (Ahmed 2012). For that matter, the legal silences and “gaps” should not be conceptualised as mere absence of framework but as silences dense with meaning and normative power that convey, as well as deep-seated nationalism, “an evident presence of institutional homophobia” as well as sexism and transphobia (Kantsa & Chalkidou 2014: 97; Chalkidou 2020).

Furthermore, as feminist legal scholar Giwta Kravaritou notes, the gender imperative of the law is not necessarily expressed in the provisions about gender but “even more so in what the law ‘thinks’ on a deeper level” (Kravaritou 1996: 144). Gender and sexual (as well as other) norms are reflected and reproduced from judicial discourses on every level even when, or especially when, gender and sexuality are not the subject in hand. Indeed, the gendering, racialisation and class stratification of a legal order does not rely solely on provisions that directly refer to such social hierarchies (Spade [2009] 2015: 59). Rather it relies upon provisions, underlying principles and structures that mobilise ideas about nationality, race, gender and sexuality to sustain or create, for example, “a general policy or program that may not explicitly target a group on its face, but that still accomplishes its racist/sexist purpose” (Spade [2009] 2015: 59). In this sense, the gendered norms that underlie the Greek legal system are present even if not explicitly invoked. This weaving of gender and sexual norms in the core of law implicitly genders its body and is distilled within state apparatuses and carried through all aspects of institutional life up to the last tentacle of administrative authority.(36) Hence, understanding who this legal order is hospitable for poses no riddle for anyone who has navigated legal and administrative apparatuses as a citizen, legal professional(37) or litigant who does not represent the primordial national subject in his ideal form.

Returning to some of the incidents discussed above, bearing such an understanding of the Greek institutional order in mind, it is not surprising that police officers and judicial employees persecuted trans women without any grounds other than their gender identity. Or, to go even further back, that migrant women, seropositive women, sex-workers and illegal substances users would be physically and socially annihilated by the state, through judicial and police mechanisms. These mechanisms have been designed precisely to do so, and appear to function infinitely less awkwardly in this role compared to when they are called on to protect “racist crime” complainants. What appears surprising, at least at a first glance, is the reform of the penal consequences of “racist crime” by Law 4139/2013 (expanding protection for the first time to gender identity) and even more so, the introduction of the “anti-racist law” Law 4285/2014, during the very same period that these operations were at their peak. In the following part of the text, the aporia concerning the introduction of “anti-racist legislation” in that particular context is negotiated not in contradiction but as part of these state projects and the discourses that enabled their legitimation.

“Racism is an Enemy of All of Us”(38)

Having entertained to some extent the difficult question of what work this legislation claimed to perform and whether it did so, what emerges is a set of even more uncomfortable questions. As noted, the “anti-racist legislation” was repeatedly evoked after its introduction only to be faced with institutional resistance. The fact that the governing authorities had no intention of enforcing such a law combined with the political imperatives of the government agenda described earlier in the article, pose the following questions: since obviously it was not the protection of marginalised populations, what was then enabled in that particular context through the introduction of this legislation? That is, what were the stakes involved in introducing such legislation for a government which dealt so much pain and violence across the axis of ethno-sexual belonging and whose own members openly opposed the “anti-racist bill” on several occasions, thus repeatedly blocking its passage (Meliggonis 2013; Sotiropoulos 2014)?

The thread of those questions is not hard to follow once we have situated this legal reform within broader state and supra-state projects and in close proximity to some of the major political recalibrations of its era. Just a glance at the media articles and reports that have been cited throughout this article makes clear that the discussion concerning “racist crimes” and their penal handling was openly centred, both on a national and international level, around Golden Dawn’s politics and their social impact. It is against the backdrop of Golden Dawn’s “irrational” and erupting racist violence, that the Greek state would redefine its own system(at)ic racist practices and its organised violent operations as necessary and “justifiable coercion” within a state of emergency (Butler 2016). This would prove a very effective strategy; one that, although neither invented nor exclusively encountered in that instance, surely fitted perfectly the context in hand. Let us turn to a government document in order to grasp the way this gesture of re-signification practically functioned.

In 2013, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe issued a report sketching out a grim picture of raging street-level as well as institutional racist violence, especially within the aforementioned anti-migrant operations such as Xenios Zeus (CommDH[2013]6). The government issued a response to this report in the form of a document from which it is difficult to isolate a single quotation, as its entire body is a blatant distortion of reality, attempting to present a false image not only of government and state authorities but also of Greek society itself.(39) The government reply, among other things, asserts the following:

This excerpt refers to specific government representatives’ statements mentioned in the Commissioner’s reports (CommDH[2013]6: 8). Those statements were some of the most notorious crystallisations of the state discourses that accompanied the militarised operations against migrant populations and had generated strong political reactions within social movements for their blatant racism and xenophobia. More importantly, it juxtaposes those operations with the actions of Golden Dawn’s para-state militia who are implicitly referred to as “self-styled ‘protectors of the law’”. And by juxtaposing the “meticulous and patient pogrom” that Xenios Zeus was (Filippidis 2018: 86) with the eruptive, lethal violence of Golden Dawn’s battalions, the government graces us here with valuable knowledge. That is, it exemplifies the way that hostile political imperatives can be materialised through the mobilisation of discourses that oppose those very imperatives and, more specifically, the way a racist, sexist, homo/transphobic regime can introduce an “anti-racist law” and still make it work in its favour.

It is through the re-naming practice seen above, through such a spectacular exercise in inverting reality, that everything described in the previous sections can be understood as ideologically neutral state operations which were aimed at providing rational solutions to practical issues. Even though the violence of Golden Dawn has been enabled by decades-long state racism (Emmanouilidis & Koukoutsaki 2013), as well as by deep ties between the extreme right-wing and other institutional political forces,(40) after the “anti-racist legislation” reform and the criminal prosecution of Golden Dawn, this violence was presented as the opposite of state rationalism. Indeed, the government discursively framed the “anti-racist legislation” as a struggle against specific forms of violence that were defined as racist violence. And in doing so it reserved for itself the right to establish certain actions and them alone as racist and violent. Walter Benjamin’s problematisation of legal violence comes to mind here, calling us to consider the ways in which the law legitimises its own violence, thus allowing its character as violent to recede from view (Benjamin [1920] 1979). Judith Butler notes that “in Benjamin’s view, legal violence regularly renames its own violent character as justifiable coercion or legitimate force, but these terms sanitise the violence at issue” (Butler 2016: 40.48). That is, by conceptualising “racist crime” and racialised violence as either the purview of Golden Dawn’s militia or an individual irrational behaviour, the Greek state re-conceptualises its own racist violence as non-racist and non-violent. Moreover, it achieves a legitimation of its extended punitive function, which was fortified in the process of prosecuting Golden Dawn as a supposedly agreed upon limit for democratic tolerance, but is ultimately also employed against all socio-political actors that are (or will be) declared as illegal or dangerous by the state (Koukoutsaki 2013).

It is only within such a framework that one can come to terms with the surge of state-sanctioned gendered and racialised violence in parallel with legal “victories” such as the legal protection against “racist crime.” And it is only within such a framework that we can fathom the formal protection from transphobic violence which is established simultaneously with the persecution of trans women, migrants and sex-workers – that is, by the exact same regime that arbitrarily hunted down, detained and harassed trans women “to enhance citizens’ feeling of safety and to improve the image” of certain areas in Thessaloniki, and by the same regime that materialised the nightmarish HIV witch-hunt against sex-workers and illegal substances users in Athens (Dendias quoted in TGEU 2013; Mavroudi 2013). Using the tautological formula traced in Benjamin’s analysis, according to which legal violence is legitimised because it is legal, the Greek government “outlawed” Golden Dawn’s racism and violence as “racist crime” while re-establishing its own practices of racialised and gendered violence as legal, thus legitimate, and, thus, non-racist and non-violent.

These incidents and the era that enclosed them have allowed us to reflect upon a specific legal reform and the conditions that enabled it. Nonetheless, as stated earlier, there is no claim of exceptionality in the political strategies discussed and their use by that particular government in that particular period. Without having to look very far, as these lines were being written, another Nea Dimokratia government applauded the conviction of Golden Dawn members by the Greek courts as, in the Prime Minister’s words, “a victory of democracy” against racism and “the end of a traumatic circle for the country’s public life” (Mitsotakis 2020).At the exact same time, the government has been escalating the “war on migrants” through both legal (e.g. new legislation and policies) and illegal (e.g. increasing numbers of “pushbacks” along the borders, slow death conditions in detention camps) means (Amnesty International 2019; Human Rights Watch 2020a, 2020b; Border Violence Monitoring Group 2020; Dimitras 2020). The same government that celebrated the “victory of democracy”, with the pretext of the Covid-19 outbreak and following the example of many other states (Amnesty International 2020a), has been increasingly imposing a regulatory regime wherein normalised police violence and repression, not only against social movements but life itself, has become a structural element of this new era of governance (Amnesty International 2020b; Pietromarchi 2020; Crimethinc 2020a, 2020b; Athanasiadis 2020; Konstantopoulos 2020; Filippidis 2020). In fact, under the prism of the non-exceptionality of such political manoeuvres, another take on the international aspects of the “anti-racist law” debate is also tempting. That is, the international articles and reports that have been cited throughout this article (see footnotes 12, 15, 18) which epitomise the criticism by the representatives of European institutions of the Greek state’s inability to battle racialised violence and institutional racism, could be read within a similar schema of self-justificatory authority and re-naming function.

The abundance of European institutions’ reports and articles frowning upon the increase of hate-crime, racist violence and xenophobic rhetoric in Greece during that period, carefully side-stepped the wider framework that dictated and encompassed the strengthening of border militarisation, the creation of detention camps and the mass police operations in Greek cities. For example, the Commissioner stated in his aforementioned report:

In other words, the problem with the operation Xenios Zeus was to be found in its flawed execution, as it appears that there are more correct and “objective” ways of recognising individuals on the street as foreigners, massively detaining populations, classifying them as legal or illegal and accordingly deciding on their detention/deportation/relocation, etc. The militarisation of European borders and the securitisation of cities as a political project in itself, along with the xenophobic discourses that enabled it, recede from view here. Regardless of this procedural sensitivity, it was the European Union that funded operation Xenios Zeus and it was a European political intervention which established the presence of FRONTEX on Greek borders (resulting in hundreds of deaths) and which progressively, through the sealing of borders along the Balkan route, trapped thousands of people in slow death conditions on the Greek periphery and in detention camps (Human Rights Watch 2011; Martin 2013; Amnesty International 2014, Carastathis 2015). As Carastathis notes, it is the EU “which funds the Greek state’s immigration practices – enforcement, detention and deportation even as the European Court of Human Rights denounces them” (Carastasthis 2015: 78). That is not to say that the Hellenic Police and other institutional agents do not demonstrate unapologetic cruelty. But even without this aspect, these operations would still be founded upon racist imperatives and the forceful materialisation of the “fortress Europe” dogma that categorically deals in racialised violence and death.

Although the existence of the EU, as we know it, is inextricably linked to racialised violence, at the same time, the investment in its depiction as defender and provider of human rights resulted in its condemnation of the increasing racist violence in Greece. As hinted at earlier, the international political pressure was of crucial importance for the unwilling introduction of “anti-racist legislation” by the Nea Dimokratia governing coalition. Indeed, at that particular moment in European politics and with feverish negotiations concerning Greece’s financial support unfolding, we do not have to dig very deep to see why negative attention from European institutions could not be ignored by any government. During the public debate concerning this reform, which had already been attempted by previous governments, representatives of European institutions repeatedly called on the Greek state to “do more” in order to combat racist violence within its territory.(41) In these gestures, the European Union’s legal violence, which materialised in Greece in both migrant population management and the enforcement of austerity politics, re-legitimised itself through the concern to combat “racist crime” as the true form of racism and violence. Thus, the reform of the “anti-racist legislation” established on both national and European communicational fronts that European political forces and states strive against racism and xenophobia while racist and xenophobic political projects were being intensified.

Closing

Throughout this article, I have attempted to trace the less obvious work performed by the “anti- racist legislation” within exemplary moments of Greek and European neoliberal racist politics. Situating the reform within a context of hostile ideological imperatives that materialised through state operations targeting marginalised populations, a set of questions emerged concerning the introduction of this legislation overall and the inclusion, for the first time, of gender identity among the protected characteristics. The formal declaration of legal protection was juxtaposed not only with the aforementioned militarised operations, which have relied upon gendered hierarchies, social abjection and legalised violence, but also with the overall atmosphere of the Greek institutional order. This juxtaposition was enabled by utilising feminist conceptualisations of gendered violence in Greece as atmospheric, thus avoiding the misrepresentation of whatever lies beyond concrete isolatable incidents as a non-violent/racist/transphobic reality (Carastathis 2018a). The argument was also furthered by a conceptualisation of the Greek legal order as inherently gendered and selectively hospitable only for those whom it was designed to facilitate in terms of ethno-religious and national belonging. Through this prism and under the regime of crisis management by a right-wing government, which largely relied on rhetorics of national and ethno-sexual purity, the workings of the legislation against “racist crime” emerged as ambiguous.

Trying to account for the seemingly inexplicable coincidence of formal legal protection and system(at)ic annihilation of the nation’s Others, I have argued that precisely through the investment in a (legal and political) lexicon that formally prohibits specific forms of discrimination, racism and violence, an entire set of practices and imperatives were re-conceptualised and legitimised as non-racist and non-violent. Following Benjamin’s thought on the tautological formula that legitimises legal violence (because it is legal), it was suggested that both the Greek state’s massive operations against the country’s ethno-sexual Others and the materialisation of the European imperatives of “fortress Europe” relied heavily on the process of re-naming their own racist violence as justifiable coercion. The Greek government, by using a conceptualisation of Golden Dawn’s practices as the sole definition of racist and overall discriminatory violence, constructed an image of irrational, hate-instigated, neo-Nazi racism as racism, thus, re-naming its own calculated institutional racism and violence as non-racist and non-violent. In other words, in the process of the systematic ethno-sexual persecution and systemic cruelty of that era, the “anti-racist legislation” was utilised, in an insidious way, against the marginalised populations it was supposedly designed to protect.

As shown earlier, at least until 2017, the “anti-racist” legal framework was spectacularly underused and even resisted by the prosecuting authorities (Dimitras 2017; Tsarnas 2017). During the last couple of years there has been an increase in its use and even some high-profile litigation produced (Dimitras 2019). Whether this litigation will live up to the expectations of the rationale of hate crime and anti-discrimination law “to teach the nation respect” is another conversation that far exceeds the scope of this article (Beger [2004] 2009: 113). It has not been the goal of the article to appraise the usefulness of such a framework or to measure the extent and correctness of its application in the specific context, even if such data was indeed evoked. Neither has it been its goal to attempt an overall critique of hate crime or LGBTI+ rights as concepts within the context of neoliberal states in a globalised capitalist world. The present analysis has unfolded in areas that these debates cross but also, in a way, sunder. Through concrete accounts regarding the law’s introduction and application (how, when and by whom was it introduced, how and to what extent was it applied and in parallel with which specific operations) the threads were followed to a discussion regarding the political work that was performed by this reform on a macro level. In that particular instance, the legislation was instrumental for the legitimation of governmental politics that dealt racialised and gendered violence. That is not to suggest that we should reject in principle formal protection against discrimination and violence. This was never the point of this article as stated in the beginning. The point of this article and the conclusions it draws is to contribute towards the demystification of such legal protection by regimes that categorically rely upon the very principles such laws claim to combat. It is also to serve as a reminder to persistently allow our understanding of LGBTI-related legal developments to be engrafted with uncomfortable questions regarding the complex political junctures in which they are situated.

This article opened by narrating the end of an era in Greece. As historical time is becoming increasingly condensed, it closes with everyone’s eyes on the dawning of the new and incomputable post-pandemic reality. In this accelerating time, in these previously unfathomable conditions of our (not equally) shared bio-political dystopia, we will have to make sense of new and old political apparatuses, government strategies and legal reforms. As Europe and its states are increasingly abandoning the pretexts of their supposed humanitarian core, the stakes of such politico-legal manoeuvres are becoming higher. Here, on Europe’s border and periphery, the formal protection of migrants from neo-Nazis and traffickers coincides with daily push-backs by the coastguard and massive entrapment in slow death conditions along the Greek borders. The formal protection of marginalised groups coincides with institutional hostility and legal violence against them. Lately, even the formal protection of our health coincides with increased surveillance, police violence and the deprivation of the right to protest. In this context, let us bear in mind the connections, such as the ones made in the article, between “progressive” legislation, state violence and the strategic precarisation of populations on a state and suprastate level. Let us stay with these connections’ potential for articulating a political critique of the law and be reminded that “in addition to its legitimacy, the state achieves a good deal of its power through its devious claims to resolve the very inequalities that it actually entrenches by depoliticizing” (Brown 1995: 109). At the end of the day, if nothing else, let us remain suspicious and critical towards legal “progress” that coincides with so much institutional hostility, legalised violence and normalised death.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Stephen Whittle and Kay Lalor for their help and support during my PhD project at MMU from which this article is drawn. Also, I want to thank Aspa Chalkidou and Christos Filippidis for the discussions and their advice on this article. Last, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their supportive feedback.

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Theofilopoulos, T. (2016) ‘Ταυτότητα φύλου και πρόσβαση στην αγορά εργασίας’ (‘Gender identity and access to the employment market’). Paper presented in the conference: Η διάσταση του φύλου στην κοινωνική πολιτική και κοινωνιολογία (The gender aspect in social policy and sociology), Athens, 7 October.

Theofilopoulos, T. (2018) ‘Η κοινωνία των πολιτών και οι εχθροί της: Aνθρωπιστικές οργανώσεις και εξτρεμιστική δεξιά στην Ελλάδα της κρίσης’ (‘Civil society and its enemies: Humanitarian organisations and extreme right-wing in the Greece of crisis’). Paper presented at: The sixth conference of the Hellenic Sociological Society, Charokopeio University, Athens, 29-31 March.

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Greek Legislation

Law 2503/1997 (GG A 107/30.5.1997) ‘Administration, organisation, staffing of regions amendment of provisions concerning the local government and other provisions.’

Law 3896/2010 (GG Α΄207/8.12.2010) ‘On the implementation of the principle of equal opportunities and equal treatment of men and women in matters of employment and occupation – Harmonisation of legislation with Directive 2006/54/ΕC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 July 2006.’

Law 4285/2014 (GG Α 191/10.9.2014) ‘Implementing the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA.’

Law 4356/2015 (GG Α' 181/24.12.2015) ‘On the co-habitation contract, exercise of rights, penal and other provisions.’

Law 4491/2017 (GG A 152/13.10.2017) ‘Legal recognition of gender identity – National mechanism for the materialisation, monitoring and evaluation of action plans for children’s rights and other provisions.’

Public Health Decree 39A/2012 (GG B 1002/02.04.2012) ‘Provisions concerning controlling the contagion of infectious diseases.’

The introduction of “anti-racist legislation” in the Greek legal order: Political strategies, legalised violence and the formal protection of gender identity

Abstract