Credit: Εuropean Union-EP

• Greece is spending the largest part (37%) of its green-transition money on renewable-energy projects. Only 11% is going to projects that directly address climate change. 
• Of the 172 green milestones and targets, the Greek government has yet to meet 79% of them. 
• To date, disbursements for green investments are stalled at €3 billion, while Greece has access to a total of €14.3 billion in green bonds. 
• Greece’s renewables projects are in trouble due to inadequate planning. A much-postponed study is expected in late 2025. In the meantime, the country risks being hauled before the European Court of Justice for the irregular siting of wind turbines. 
• None of Greece’s projects have involved proper environmental auditing. But Greece is nonetheless betting on the untried technology of carbon capture and storage. 
• The recovery plan’s “no significant harm” principle looks inadequate from an environmental standpoint. 

The term “green investment” has long since lost the prestige it once enjoyed. Renewable-energy installations (wind turbines, solar photovoltaics, etc.) now encounter systematic opposition from Greek country-dwellers. Meanwhile, a pile of money from the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) has become available to fund the so-called green transition and promote Europe’s self-sufficiency in energy. So what will this transition involve? And will proper protections be afforded to the local environment?

The European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) and the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting (MIIR) have put the European Commission’s own data under the microscope, alongside the national recovery plans of Greece and 10 other countries in southern and eastern Europe. We hope to shed light on the real impact of the projects funded by the EU scheme.

How much of Greece’s allocation is going to climate targets?

The new EU money means different things for different EU countries. For some, the recovery fund represents a unique opportunity to achieve development. This is particularly true for the countries of southern and eastern Europe, which have received the greatest funding in relation to GDP. These include Greece, Croatia, Spain, Romania, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia. It is why we chose to look at these countries in particular.

All 11 countries examined are meeting the requirement that 37% of their allocation be invested in the green transition. Some exceed it by far. In particular, Hungary devotes 67% of its resources to climate and environmental objectives. Bulgaria, in second place, is also spending more than half (57%) of its funds on green measures, and Slovakia and Poland are close behind with 48% and 47% respectively. Greece is in tenth place with 38%. 

A more detailed breakdown of green-transition spending shows that Greece (together with 4 other countries: Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Hungary) committed the largest share of its money to renewable-energy projects. Four countries (Croatia, Spain, Portugal and Slovakia) targeted energy efficiency measures. Only two countries (Romania and Italy) directed the lion’s share of their money to sustainable transport projects.

It is hard to know with certainty why countries decide to invest more in one target than another. However, we can speculate about their motivations. For example, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania have invested more than half of their allocation in renewable-energy projects. Eurostat figures show that Poland and Hungary in particular rank last among EU countries for renewable-energy consumption. They therefore have an extra incentive to invest in this area in order to comply with existing European targets.

But this is not the case of Greece’s national plan, which nonetheless directs much (37%) of its money to renewables. Based on the same Eurostat statistics, Greece is in the middle of the European pack in terms of renewables with 22.7% (representing the total renewable share for transport, electricity, heating and cooling). The EU-27 average figure is 23%.

So why did Greece choose to invest disproportionately in renewables projects compared to other areas, notably energy efficiency (33%, mainly meaning the renovation of poorly insulated buildings)? And why is it investing so little in climate mitigation and adaptation (only 11%, even though this challenge is a critical concern for Greece) or in transport (3%, despite major deficiencies in Greek cities, especially Athens)?

“The Greek recovery plan was not done properly”, argues Theodota Nantsou, head of environmental policy at WWF Greece. “Where the money should have been channelled, and it was an opportunity, was the Greek building sector. That is, upgrades for energy efficiency, and better insulation of buildings. The climate crisis is coming and it will hit the building stock mercilessly.”

No thermal insulation

Of the approximately 6.5 million residences in Greece, more than half were built before 1980 and so have no thermal insulation. Based on data from Greece’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, 77% of those homes that have been issued energy performance certificates are classified in the three worst classes (E, Z and H), while less than 5% are in the two best classes.

Greece’s national “Save” programme uses the recovery fund’s resources for the thermal renovation of houses, but it is “completely inadequate”, says Nantsou. “It is too little money when Greece has such leaky buildings. This was a huge opportunity to upgrade the building sector so that basements, and old apartment buildings, and houses in villages that depend on coal and fire-burning stoves, are viable.”

The issue of thermal insulation of buildings is critical for another reason: it is inextricably linked to energy poverty, i.e. people’s inability to pay for the electricity and fuel that will keep their homes at tolerable temperatures.

As things stand, heating and cooling can be an expensive luxury for energy-poor Greeks. According to Eurostat data, more than one in three of them (34%) do not live in an adequately cool home during the summer months.

Credit: Freepik

Renewables without proper planning of land use

There is another conundrum at the heart of Greece’s national recovery plan. Despite the large share of investment channelled to renewables projects, local environmental protection has been poor.

Most of the measures included in the Greek plan did include zero-cost commitments to improve the regulatory framework in this or that area. In terms of the green transition, such commitments were “piecemeal and basically intended to benefit renewables”, Nantsou explains. They do not deal with Greece’s longstanding issues of poor land-use planning and environmental regulation.

“Greek renewables are indeed progressing rapidly”, she notes, “but that is because there is sun and wind, and not because the permitting process is good or because of proper land-use planning which tells the investor where and if the wind installation can be built.”

Wind-farm park at Petra Skeli, Crete – Credit: Documentary “Askos tou Aiolou”

Wind farms off the leash

It is for this reason that the EU Commission has an ongoing infringement case against Greece for its uncontrolled siting of wind farms (the procedure is stuck at the consultation stage since February 2023). Greece has no proper land-use plan for renewables, as the existing one is outdated (2008) and does not comply with the EU directive on the protection of Natura sites.

In a routine annual meeting with staff of the Greek environment ministry, Commission officials recently warned that Greece is now likely to be referred to the European Court of Justice “given that the revision of the renewables land-use plan, which should include an examination of cumulative impacts, is postponed from year to year”.

The environment ministry’s most recent such postponement runs till the end of 2025. The tender process for commissioning the study was launched in 2019.

Given this problematic framework for developing renewables, the Greek government added a clause to its recovery plan that will strengthen the regulations for offshore wind farms in particular. The same provision also provides for the “review” and “optimization” of land use for other renewable-energy projects, such as solar panels on agricultural land.

It is no coincidence that in the list of the 100 largest recipients of funding from the European recovery fund, a number of wind and solar operators are prominent, such as Terna Energy, which received the 12th largest grant (€250 million). Among the projects listed on the “Greece 2.0” website, “an electricity storage system crucial for the development of renewables” was prominent, with a budget of €200 million. The list also includes controversial carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, which will be discussed below.

It is worth noting that this list of the largest recipients was last renewed in November 2023: the Greek government has not adhered to the fund’s requirement to update the list twice a year. Based on the EU Commission’s guidelines, the recipient is considered to be the entity (a company or individual) that receives the fund’s resources directly and is not a contractor. Hence the list contains ministries and public agencies that subsequently contract out the projects, and it does not include all the private contractors that emerge after contracts are awarded. The same applies to the list of projects on the Greece 2.0 site, such as the aforementioned renewable-energy storage systems. For such projects it is nonetheless indicated that a competitive tender procedure will be followed for the contractors.

Credit: Pixabay

No reform of the environmental audit system

At the same time, Greece’s national plan includes no reform of environmental auditing. On this, Nantsou, of WWF, is unequivocal: “There is no serious environmental control in Greece. At the moment, anyone goes where they want and builds what they want, and they know that it will be legalised after a few years. They don’t pay the taxes they should, they don’t make sure they get a building permit as they should, or do the study as they should, or dump the waste water as they should. And then the real cost, the environmental cost, is borne by us all.”

Greece “has not set milestones and targets in order to build a robust control mechanism that is proven to help, as the OECD and the EU have said”, argues Nantsou. “When you have robust control mechanisms, you have a healthier environment, better innovation and healthier economic activity. Such reforms have not been included in the Greek plan.”

Far behind in meeting milestones

Regarding the fulfilment of the 172 milestones and targets and the 71 deadlines featured in Greece’s recovery plan, Greece has so far failed to meet 79% of them. This situation is also true of other countries in the region. Italy and Croatia have only met 25% of them.

€3 billion received so far by Greece for green investments

The total amount disbursed by Greece from the recovery fund for all the pillars of the programme stands at €17.2 billion, according to the Greece 2.0 website. Greece is entitled to receive €36 billion in loans (€17.73 billion) and non-repayable grants (€18.22 billion), which in total represents 16.2% of Greek GDP.

According to the data on NextGenerationEU green bonds (the financial mechanism that feeds the climate-related resources of the Recovery and Resilience Facility), Greece is eligible to receive €14.359 billion, which ranks it 5th among EU countries.

According to EU Commission figures, Greece has so far received a total of €2.84 billion under the green transition facility and an additional €153 million of initial funding under the RePowerEU programme, totalling almost €3 billion. The equivalent figure for Italy is €15.5 billion, with Poland in second place (€7 billion) and Spain third (€6.6 billion).

Carbon capture and storage: a controversial technology

The Greek plan includes carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. This technology allows carbon dioxide to be captured from factories and power plants, then compressed and stored in repositories in natural geological formations underground. It is controversial and possibly dangerous.

Specifically, the Greek plan provides for “the establishment of a legal framework, a licensing framework and a regulatory framework for carbon capture, usage and storage technologies”. Two specific investments were made: one to provide financial support “for the development of the first CO2 storage facility in Greece” and the second concerning “CO2 transport”.

The first and largest investment relates to a project of the company Energean, which is developing Greece’s first CO2 storage facility. This involves the conversion of “depleted” oil reservoirs in the subsea basin of Prinos near Kavala (northern Greece) into geological repositories. The project has been included in the Produc-E Green action plan, and has a total budget of €300 million. However, the final amount of its subsidy remains unconfirmed, as this particular plan includes different categories of subsidy which encompass the production of electric cars, chargers and batteries, as well as recycling.  

The second investment, under RePowerEU, concerns the construction of a pipeline in the Attica region. This will connect two cement plants to a liquefaction terminal (possibly in Revithoussa), from where the liquefied CO2 emissions will be transported by ship to the storage site in Prinos.

Right from the public-consultation stage, environmental organisations have been opposed to the inclusion of CCS investments. In a comment on the matter, WWF argued that CCS “is extremely costly and offers a questionable and scientifically unproven contribution to climate change mitigation” and that its use is not a “panacea for decarbonising industry and should not be an excuse” for avoiding it.

Nantsou elaborates: “This is essentially a fairy tale of the oil industry. In most cases it is being used as a means of mitigation, to absorb the industry’s own emissions. This way they can continue their polluting activity by burying their emissions.”

CCS is risky since it involves burying the carbon dioxide in rocks under high pressure, a process that can cause dangerous leaks into the subsoil. Although the technology is experimental, this has not stopped industries from requesting exemptions from their obligation to reduce their pollution on the grounds that they will later install CCS.

Worse still, in this case the risks are not limited to those mentioned above. The document accompanying the storage permit for the Prino investment makes clear that the prospective carbon repository is only partially depleted. In its words, “care will be taken to ensure that any potential oil or gas extraction will be limited to the necessary needs to manage pressure and ensure the safety of the storage sites, and any such extraction will only take place if it is necessary for the safe storage of CO2. The CO2, together with any oil or gas that may be extracted, will be separated and returned for permanent storage.”

Credit: Hellenic Hydrocarbons and Energy Resources Management Company (HEREMA)

“No significant harm”: an inadequate principle

According to the technical guidance provided by the EU Commission to the member states, the so-called “no significant harm” principle must be applied to all projects included in national recovery plans. This stipulates that no measure should cause significant harm to existing environmental objectives.

Beyond the obviously ambiguous nature of the term (i.e., the definition of what constitutes significant harm), the Commission has been criticised from the outset by environmental groups for its failure to ensure that the recovery measures are accompanied by environmental protection.

Green10, an umbrella group of ten international environmental organisations, complained in a public statement about the principle’s simplified criteria as presented in the technical guidance. It would appear that the environmental assessments of projects undertaken by each EU country was a simple matter of box-ticking on questionnaires.

After reviewing a number of European projects, Green10 found that “the assessments carried out by member states under the ‘no significant harm’ criterion were of poor quality and would not be effective in preventing environmental harm”.

In particular, “many recovery plans do not contain enough detail to allow for an assessment of their environmental impact”, while some “approved measures do not even specify the exact locations or details, and therefore the measures should not have been approved”. For example, one approved plan included funding for 29 irrigation projects whose locations were not even disclosed! Unfortunately, such cases are not the exception, notes the environmental group. “The assessments provided by member states did not accurately reflect the potential damage of this and other such projects. That will only become apparent later in the process, when the funds have already been disbursed.”

By then it will be too late. The damage will have been done, and the money spent.

*This investigation is part of a cross-border European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) project, headed by Openpolis, with the participation of MIIR, Dennik N and Eurologus.

Next image credit: European Union-EP 

Research/text: Kostas Zafeiropoulos, Nikos Morfonios, Janine Louloudi (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualizations: Corina Petridi

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou 

On the 15th of December 2022 the European Medicines Agency announced that almost every EU country was facing medical replenishment gaps. It was known that a harsh winter was ahead for European countries facing both the Covid 19 pandemic and other seasonal viruses that were testing their health systems anew. However, what actually happened this year surpassed any forecast.

‘’To be honest, what took place this winter was that European countries were taken by surprise with such a large mismatch between supply and demand, especially for antibiotics’’, Steffen Thirstrup admits to MIIR – Health Head of EMA (European Medicines Agency), which is the competent body that guarantees the scientific assessment, supervision and monitoring for medicines safety in the EU.

From 2000 to 2018 there has been a 20-fold increase in recorded drug shortages in Europe. It’s like a disease that gets worse every year without -yet- a cure. The war in Ukraine and the energy crisis were used as a convenient excuse in various countries for political leaders to attempt to cover reality. But the problem seems to have other, timeless causes.

According to the latest 2022 European Pharmaceutical Union (PGEU) report, all EU countries that responded to the survey (including pharmaceutical chambers and pharmacy associations of 29 countries in the European region) experienced drug shortages in pharmacies in the last 12 months. The majority of countries reported that the situation worsened compared to the previous 12 months (75.86%) or remained the same (24.14%). No country recorded an improvement.

‘’Medicines shortages are increasing in Europe and have a huge negative impact on patients. They occur across all healthcare settings and involve both essential life-saving medicines and very commonly used medicines. Community pharmacists are very concerned about this phenomenon, which can compromise patients’ health. Moreover, pharmacies and pharmacists invest a lot of resources dealing with shortages which constitutes not only a financial burden, but also a loss of opportunity to spend time with other patient-centered tasks and to improve the quality of care”, Ilaria Pasarani,  General Secretary of PGEU, tells MIIR. On average, each pharmacy in the European Union spends 6.3 hours a week looking for missing medicines. In some countries this number reaches 20 hours per week.

‘’At present the situation is that most European countries are still reporting shortages. This is observed in 28 out of the 30 countries of the European Economic Area. The result would have been the same if you had also asked me two weeks ago,’’ EMA’s Steffen Thirstrup  points out to MIIR.

Nevertheless, which countries record the greatest drug shortages in recent years? Are the data reliable? What are the real reasons and why are we increasingly unable to find the medicines prescribed by our doctor in pharmacies? Which categories of drugs, which active substances are missing, and above all, why are they missing? The answers are not unequivocal, they are often difficult to find and they are not always common for all countries.

Inhomogeneity in records

At a pan-European level there is not yet a homogenized database recording drug shortages -i.e. in the same language- with data that can be seen in real time. There is not even a definitive European agreement on how a shortage is defined. Several European states have adopted the definition of the European Medicines Agency (EMA, 2019): “A shortage of a medicine for human or veterinary use occurs when the supply does not meet the demand at national level”.

Assessments for the actual duration of medicinal shortages are often difficult to be determined, precisely because of the gaps and inconsistencies in national medical association registries. Many listings do not even provide an (assessed) expiration date for each shortage. Most European countries have only started collecting standardized information on shortages in the last five years. There are also notable differences in the obligations surrounding the reporting of shortages. For example, in Denmark notifications are made only for “severe” shortages, while in Sweden only shortages with an expected duration of more than three weeks are required for notification by the system.

There are countries that do not even provide a registration website, while in others the database includes in parallel human, hospital, veterinary and vaccine medicines. Furthermore, not all countries publish their data in the same way. For example, the Greek National Organization for Medicines (EOF) doesn’t publish the shortages annually, doesn’t mention the classification of drugs, and does not systematically provide data about the duration of a shortage. EU member states are also far from harmonizing standards for recording and reporting shortages, a fact which hinders information-sharing and comparative analysis between countries. 

We asked the European Medicines Agency (EMA) whether it keeps aggregated data for all EU countries, but the answer was negative. Instead, the EMA referred us to the websites of the national medicine’s registries. 

‘’Some states have a very detailed network of information collection from community pharmacies, and from hospital pharmacies. But not everyone has it to the same degree. Some states have sophisticated IT systems to look at supply and demand, and can therefore respond much more quickly”, EMA’s Steffen Thirstrup explains, hoping this gap will be bridged in the future.

In an attempt to partially fill this information gap, MIIR together with collaborating media teams from EDJNET spent a three month period looking for data and managed to create an -as homogeneous as possible- updated database on drug shortages in Europe. We recorded 22,107 different entries over a five-year period (2018-2023) in a total of 9 European countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Greece, Romania, Austria, Belgium), from which it was possible to gather reliable data, either by extracting data from published statistics in the national medicine’s associations or by submitting data requests. In many of the above countries, we traced the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification, the marketing authorisation holder, the starting & ending date of the shortage and reasons for it being taken off circulation. 

Key Conclusions

From the total of the 9 aforementioned countries over the last five years (2018-2023), when adding up the new shortages of each year, it appears that Italy cumulatively registers the most shortages in absolute number (10,843) for human medicines, quite far from the second Czech Republic (2,699) and the third Germany (2,355). Lastly, Greece (389) is the country with the fewest records of shortages in absolute numbers.

Accordingly, 371 vaccine shortages were recorded in the countries under review in the period 2018-2023, with Italy leading (144 vaccine shortages), followed by Germany (102) and the Czech Republic (57). Belgium recorded the fewest shortages (8).

Nevertheless, the absolute number of medicines and vaccines in short supply is not always the best way to draw safe conclusions, given that not all countries keep record of their stocks with the same consistency and the same criteria. In addition, these are different reference populations, countries with different levels of demand, while the different pharmaceutical import-export balance must also be taken into account. 

The safest recording indicator that best describes the situation in each country is the duration of a shortage. In order to find the average duration of shortages in the European countries that we examined, we excluded extreme values ​​by calculating the median. Of the 22,107 drug entries we processed in total, we had data on shortages’ duration for 16,945.  Based on these, the European average duration of shortages is 94 days, meaning that it takes about three months for a drug to be back on the market. 

From the analysis MIIR conducted on the data collected, it appears that Greece has the longest median duration of shortages (130 days), followed by Germany (120 days) and Belgium (103 days). The Czech Republic may have been second in absolute numbers of shortages, but it registers the shortest amount of time with drugs in shortage (41 days).

The European average of vaccine shortages, again excluding extremes, amounts to 84 days, less than that for medicines.
For vaccines, the longest median duration of shortages is traced accordingly in Italy (111 days), Germany (68 days) and the Czech Republic (66).

The most comprehensive study carried out in recent years on medicine shortages was that of the Technopolis Group consultancy on behalf of the EU (Future-proofing pharmaceutical legislation – study on medicine shortages), which was published in December 2021. In that research, the Netherlands and Portugal turned out to be the “champions” of medicines in shortage in 2019 (over 1600 different drug shortages). In contrast, that year Austria, Croatia, Iceland and Greece recorded fewer than 100 shortages, relating to 60 or less different medicines. 

The same survey ascertained that the average duration across all shortages notices was 137 days and that 66% of all shortages were resolved within the first three months. The minimum duration of the shortage was one day, the maximum duration was about 13.5 years (!) and is related to amoxicillin which was in short supply in Spain from September 2005 until March 2019. Amoxicillin is still today among active substances that are missing mostly from the European market. However, it is noted that in all 9 countries for which data was collected by MIIR, very significant increases in shortages are recorded in 2022 compared to the previous year.

The largest percentage increase in the absolute number of drug shortages from 2021 to 2022 is recorded in Greece, which is due to the possible under-reporting by the Greek National Organisation for Medicines (EOF) or the non-declarations of the actual shortages. Pharmaceutical associations in Greece complain that the real shortages are much more than those declared by EOF.

“The shortages are neither 80 nor 130. They start from 400 and upwards. This is the image I have from running a pharmacy; I don’t care what EOF tells me. I find it reasonable for any government not to want to be exposed. If I were in the position of the respective government, I would do the same. I would call the EOF president and tell him to declare that we have at most 100 shortages. I don’t think you can have an objective view from EOF, its presidents are always appointed by the respective government,” says Konstantinos Lourantos, who has been the president of the Pharmaceutical Association of Attica for 27 years.

For the needs of this report we contacted and repeatedly sent written questions to the president of the Greek National Registry, D. Filippou, without receiving any answer.

Reasons of shortages 

According to the MIIR analysis, in a total of 6 countries (Germany, Spain, Greece, Austria, Slovenia, Czech Republic), the most drugs in shortage are those related to the neural system (1718 drugs, 19.03% of the total), such as anesthetics, psychotropics, antidepressants, anxiolytics, antiepileptics, antiparkinsonian drugs, etc.). In second place we find cardiovascular drugs (1307, 14.48% of all shortages) and in third place the anti-infectives for systemic use – antibiotics (1126 drugs, 12.47% of all). On the contrary, almost zero shortages are recorded in the same sample in the category of antiparasitic, insecticides and insect repellents.

Τhe latest report of the European Pharmaceutical Union PGEU (2022) for all European countries offered similar conclusions, according to which cardiovascular drugs were omitted in most countries (82.76%), followed by drugs for the nervous system and anti-infectives for systemic use – antibiotics (79.31%) and drugs for the respiratory system (75.86%).

In that survey almost all responding countries reported that drug shortages cause distress and suffering to patients (93.10%), discontinuation of treatments (89.66% of countries), increased co-payments as a result of more expensive and alternative solutions that are not reimbursed by the state (72.41%), but also fewer effective treatments (58.62%).

“I have been searching for 8 months and have not been able to find my medicine. The pharmacists tell me to be patient, it may come but we don’t know when”, 25-year-old Eleftheria, who suffers from a rare disease, tells MIIR. “They don’t even give me an explanation as to the reason why it suddenly stopped being available, all I hear is that this medicine is imported and that the multinational company that produces it hasn’t sent it,” she adds. As a substitute she takes another drug that does not fully cover her for the condition, and on the advice of her endocrinologist she has adjusted her diet to make up for the substances she lacks. She works as a babysitter in homes taking care of young children. “Especially this winter, I have been told by parents that not only simple medicines, respiratory and antibiotics for viruses are not easy to find, but even a simple serum,” she says.

The impact of Covid- 19

All researches converge that the problem is growing and concerns millions of patients on the European continent. “During the pandemic, but also in the post-pandemic era, with the post-COVID syndrome to have affected a large part of the population, the need for medicines and treatments increased. This fact led to an increase, to a certain extent, of the shortages of medicines”, underlined  Ioulia Tseti, CEO of the Tsetis Pharmaceutical Group of Companies and general secretary of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV).

But this explanation is not enough. As she explains, “the problems of the supply chain and the dependence of the European Union countries on raw materials from third countries, made the problem even more explosive. As well as the fact that countries such as India and China banned the export of raw materials for their own needs – this also aggravated the problem. And it is known that when raw materials are scarce, the price is high. We must not forget that the shortage of raw materials and the increase in energy costs were reinforced by the war in Ukraine, as the (once) rich and sufficient grain silo of Ukraine is a raw material for medicine production. Unfortunately, Europe is dependent on third countries and at some point, it must become independent, acquire sufficiency and self-sufficiency in raw materials.”

The war is not the only one to blame…

The root causes of the problem are generally the result of different economic, structural or regulatory causes, Ilaria Passarani, general secretary of the PGEU, underlines at MIIR. She herself summarizes these as follows:

“o   the increasingly globalized nature of pharmaceutical manufacturing, including Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), with production concentrated in fewer sites distributed around the world;

o   Shifts in demand, resulting from longer term factors such as demographic change, but also short-term factors such as tendering of medicines leading to difficulties in providing sufficient quantities of medicines for some markets;

o   Pricing strategies, both low and high, and regulatory changes that in some cases may have an impact on supply;

o   the imposition of fixed quotas of medicines by the pharmaceutical industry, often not sufficient in relation to patients’ actual needs;

o   the removal of the traditional role of the full line wholesalers as a result of Direct to Pharmacy (DTP) schemes in some markets;

o   the abolition and ineffectiveness of public service obligation/minimum national stock keeping requirements in some countries;

• the lack of priority given to smaller markets;
• The effects of the European internal market dynamics (e.g., exports).”

Dependance and friction point

As it turns out, at European level the over-reliance on a small number of suppliers for active pharmaceutical ingredients and other raw materials has made it difficult for manufacturers to meet current demand. China and India together account for more than 60% of the world’s supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients in 2020. Parallel exports are often seen by pharmacists and the pharmaceutical industry as part of the problem.

“It is a fact that parallel exports magnify the problem as the more expensive prices of the same products in European countries push pharmacies to export in order to take advantage of their price difference and, by extension, increase their profitability”, Ioulia Tseti, CEO of the Tsetis Pharmaceutical Group of Companies, tells MIIR. 

At the same time, however, at the European level, pharmaceutical companies seem to have reduced the stocks they keep in their warehouses. Thus, when a problem occurs in a manufacturing plant, the stocks are not sufficient to meet the needs until the problem is overcome and drug production returns to normal.

“Parallel exports” are a challenging point  between pharmaceutical manufacturers and drug dealers, since through them the pharmacies get a part of the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. For this reason, the multinational pharmaceutical companies strictly control the quantities they give to the domestic pharmacies, in order to limit the chances of exporting their products and the loss of profits in developed markets with high prices. All of this encourages any pharmacists who can obtain drugs directly from the companies to do so, even though this happens at an extremely slow pace.

But what is Europe doing to deal with a problem that looks like a difficult balancing act in an industry with huge competing interests? Within the next few weeks, the European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakidou will submit the long-awaited proposals for the revision of the pharmaceutical regulations, after a long period of dialogue with the pharmaceutical industry, the relevant government authorities, health professionals, the academic community and representatives of patients. 

“This dialogue and resulting policy analysis showed that shortages of medicines have become a systemic challenge with numerous vulnerabilities, including the increased complexity and specialisation of supply chains, the lack of geographical diversification of sourcing for certain products and perceived regulatory complexity”, a Commission spokesperson admits to MIIR, adding that the upcoming bill will include “stricter procurement obligations, timely notification of shortages and withdrawals and enhanced transparency of stocks”.

* Read the second part of the MIIR investigation: Parallel exports, the EOF and the Greek Statistics of drug shortages.

Photo: The spread of the deadly Mati fire in 2018, as it was simulated by the IRIS 2.0 rapid response forecast system.- Source: Meteo.gr, 2021

In the space of just 13 days in July 2023, 470,000 acres of Greek forest were burnt to ashes. Greece’s state machinery is proving inadequate to deal with extreme weather phenomena. In Rhodes, 15% of the entire island was ravaged in the worst fire in decades. From 1 January to 1 August 2023, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), a total of 550,000 hectares were burnt in the 22 largest forest fires. This is more than four times the average amount of land burnt in the years 2006-2022.

In an earlier survey by MIIR in collaboration with WWF on the economics of forest-fire protection we showed that, for the period 2016-2020, only 16.05% of public funds for fire protection were spent on fire prevention. Most, 83.95%, was spent on fire suppression. This ratio has not changed significantly since then: the Greek state has continued to invest in suppression instead of prevention. Another major problem can be found in the state’s inadequate use of scientific data during the fire season.

A typical case is the notorious fire-risk forecast map, which is published daily at 12.30pm by the General Secretariat of Civil Protection, in a rather opaque manner. This map is reproduced by all the media and forms the basis of the national Fire Service’s operational planning. It started to be used in 2003 and is published daily from 1 June to 31 October each year, under the purview of the Civil Protection. However, for twenty years now, none of the experts has known exactly what data and scientific methodology is used to produce this map.

Photo: The Civil Protection’s fire risk forecast map for 18 July, the day the huge fire broke out in Rhodes. The risk level for the island and the rest of the Dodecanese region was placed in the middle of the scale, which is classified as “high”. – Source: Ministry of Climate and Civil Protection.

 Intuition instead of data

“The map circulated by the Civil Protection, whose derivation we do not know, has no scientific sources, does not mention how the different categories are regulated, nor what it takes into account. My assessment is that the Civil Protection map comes out on the basis of simple intuition,” says Kostas Lagovardos, meteorologist and research director at the National Observatory of Athens.

The map’s first drawback, according to experts, is this lack of clarity about the exact scientific data used.

The main problem, however, is that it is issued once a day (covering the next 24 hours) and so does not take into account the very frequent variations in weather conditions during the day. As confirmed in a circular of the Civil Protection, once the map is issued, it does not change in any way.

 Photo: Excerpt from the Circular of the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection on the issue
daily Fire Risk Prediction Map from the G.G.P.P. during the 2023 fire season.

Andrianos Gourbatsis, a lieutenant-general and former deputy chief of the Fire Service, explains: “This is a big mistake, because the meteorological data may get worse, it may get better, so how is it possible not to change the map? What if you issue a hazard index of 3 for tomorrow, and suddenly in the evening the wind comes in, the temperature drops and the hazard becomes 5? This is the biggest disadvantage. There is another issue: the people who issue the map every noon then proceed to get off work, they go home, they do not follow the meteorological data of the National Weather Service.”

Another shortcoming of the map is that it treats entire regions, prefectures and other subdivisions as single units, without taking into account their different climatic conditions as pertaining to fire.

Kostas Lagovardos explains: “On the map, every region has one colour, which has no bearing on reality. For example, the winds in southern Crete are much stronger and have no relation to the winds in northern Crete. So in heavy weather, which is a typical summer event, you have a huge difference in the pyro-meteorological situation within the same prefecture. You can’t have entire regions having the same level of alert everywhere.” This means a dispersal of the firefighting forces on the ground, with all the devastation that might result.

After all, this fire-risk map is directly connected to the operational plan for fighting fires.

In the catastrophic fire in Mati in 2008 (which killed 102 people), the fire-risk map indicated a level of 4 (the maximum is 5). Andrianos Gourbatsis, who is also knowledgeable about the fires in Mati (2018) and Varibobi (2021), elaborates: “The conditions were for an index of 5 at the time. With an index of 4, the Fire Service’s state of readiness was not the maximum. If it had been 5, the Fire Service would have brought out an additional 25 units, from the 86 it had, while more fire stations would have been staffed for more hours, i.e. people would have been more ready.”

The Civil Protection’s Fire Risk Forecast Map for 23 July 2018, the day the deadly fire broke out in Mati. Source: Ministry of Climate and Civil Protection.

In the catastrophic fire in Mati in 2008 (which killed 102 people), the fire-risk map indicated a level of 4 (the maximum is 5). Andrianos Gourbatsis, who is also knowledgeable about the fires in Mati (2018) and Varibobi (2021), elaborates: “The conditions were for an index of 5 at the time. With an index of 4, the Fire Service’s state of readiness was not the maximum. If it had been 5, the Fire Service would have brought out an additional 25 units, from the 86 it had, while more fire stations would have been staffed for more hours, i.e. people would have been more ready.”

When there is a category 4 or 5 risk in an area, the Fire Service must effect an aerial surveillance. If the patrol sees a fire, the Fire Service must intervene immediately. In the catastrophic fire in Varibobi in the summer of 2021, two Air-Tractors were patrolling the area from 11 am because of the danger index. Gourbatsis notes that “Mr Hardalias [deputy minister for civil protection at the time] gave an order for them to land at 13.00 and stand by ‘if needed’. The fire in Varypobi subsequently broke out a kilometre from the airport. The planes had been on standby for 20 minutes, and precious time was lost as they got back in the air.”

Civil Protection ignoring the National Observatory

Phoebus Theodorou was for years the person who signed off on the maps of the General Secretariat of Civil Protection. He is a forester, not a meteorologist. He retired some time ago, but according to MIIR’s information, he remains an advisor to the Ministry of Climate and Civil Protection and continues to be involved in the publication of the disputed map. It is no longer approved by him, but by the scientific team at the Civil Protection secretariat. The individuals who make up this team have not been identified.

Andrianos Gourbatsis argues that “Civil Protection is stuck with the charter that was issued in 1995 when the service started. A lot of things need to change. On the weekend, these Civil Protection officials are at home, yet they still issue a map. This is not serious. They check EFFIS data every day, they see where it ‘blackens’ and issue the map accordingly”. Since the 2000s, as deputy chief of the Greek fire service, he has been asking politicians to have the map issued instead by Greece’s meteorological agency, EMY. His suggestion has gone unheeded and EMY is now doing even less work than before. It used to issue a special daily map of the conditions in the burnt areas.

Phoebus Theodorou, the official formerly in charge of issuing the Civil Protection maps, has claimed (GrTimes.gr, 08/06/2021) that they are based on the Forest Fire Weather Index (FFWI) of the Canadian Forest Service, as well as other geographic information systems and software. The National Observatory of Athens refutes this assertion. Kostas Lagovardos, at the Observatory, is categoric: “It can’t be using the Canadian index, because if it did, it would produce the results that we do. Southern and northern Crete would almost never have the same hazard index when they have different scores of 4 and 5 on the Beaufort scale.”

We contacted Phoebus Theodorou in order to answer questions about this, but to no avail. In addition, we sent written questions to the General Secretariat of Civil Protection but received no response by the time this article was published.

At the moment, the most authoritative daily fire-risk map in Greece seems to be that of the National Observatory of Athens. It is based on the Canadian pyro-meteorological index and takes into account temperature, humidity, wind, drought, how many days it has not rained, in order to produce a number to quantify risk. It offers a better analysis than the corresponding Civil Protection map, since it reaches a 2×2 km level of resolution in each region of the country. However, the fire service – at least officially – bases its planning on the Civil Protection map.

Vassiliki Kotroni, director of research at the Athens Observatory, comments that “we don’t know how the Observatory data is used by the General Secretariat for Civil Protection. We do know that our weather monitoring uses a network of 550 weather stations that we operate throughout the country. Since this data is freely available, it is possible that the Civil Protection monitors our stations. But this is not based on a memorandum of understanding, on any formalised system that would oblige us to operate in a certain way. We are doing this without any obligations. In a properly organised country, things should be a little different.”

Dr Kotroni is the scientific director of the Observatory’s Meteo team, which has pioneered a mechanism to forecast the spread of fires. Called IRIS, the system is innovative at both Greek and European levels. It aims to facilitate rapid responses to active forest fires. Knowing the location and time of the start of a fire, the system can, within 20 minutes, provide a forecast of how the fire front will develop over the next few hours. Within half an hour, it can provide a forecast for the next 24 hours. The system takes into account both the meteorology and the changing weather conditions caused by the fire itself. In 2019-2020 it was successfully used in cooperation with the Civil Protection and the Fire Service in over 200 forest fires. However, for two years now, explains Dr Kotroni, “for reasons we do not know, the cooperation has faded away, and unfortunately since 2021 it has not been sought by the Civil Protection or the Fire Service”.

Although it was available, IRIS was not used during the major fires in Varibobi and Evia in 2021. In a post after the fire in Varibobi, Meteo.gr stressed that it had carried out an “ex-post forecast”, adding that “the forecast that IRIS 2.0 could have provided operationally if it had been requested is very close to the actual spread of the fire”. Today, the IRIS system is still being developed with the Athens Observatory’s own resources, without any involvement of the state. It was not used by the Civil Protection even during the catastrophic fires of July this year.

The video shows the spread of the Varybompi forest fire in 2021, as simulated vy the IRIS 2.0 rapid forecasting system. Source: Meteo.gr

This material is published in the context of the “FIRE-RES” project co-funded by the European Union (EU). The EU is in no way responsible for the information or views expressed within the framework of the project. Responsibility for the content lies solely with EDJNet. Go to the FIRE-RES page

Authors: Janine Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios, Kostas Zafeiropoulos (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualisations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

Visualisations: Corina Petridi

On January 22nd, the first femicide for 2023 took place in Nikaia. A 50-year-old man killed his 54-year-old wife by strangulation, after first beating her up. He then called the police to tell them what had happened, uttering the aforementioned phrase on the phone. According to witness accounts and what became known after the murder, the perpetrator had been arrested by the police following domestic violence in the past, in 2017 and 2019. However his subsequent treatment by the justice system is not known. Could this crime have been avoided?

This question comes up again and again after the news of yet another femicide. Is there anything more the authorities could have done to protect the woman before she lost her life?

Apostolos Tsapas strongly voices his disappointment for the failure of law enforcement to protect his own children. 28-year-old Konstantina Tsapa, along with her 29-year-old brother Giorgos Tsapas were murdered on 5 April 2021 by her estranged husband in the village of Makrinitsa in Pelion. The double murder dominated the news at the time. It was during the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which a number of restrictions were still in place. Four days before the murders, the estranged husband had violently attacked the mother of his child and her parents in the same house.

Apostolos Tsapas describes his devastation to MIIR: “During the fight in Makrinitsa, before the murder, he had come to the house and beat all three of us: me, my wife and my late daughter. Then the police took him away, and detained him for two or three hours. But they let him go, saying to me, ‘We can’t hold him any longer’. They kept calling my daughter and asking her, ‘What should we do with him? We can’t keep him any longer’. And so he was released. We filed a complaint, but they didn’t arrest him. As for the blame… The harm has been done, my children are not coming back.” He adds that his daughter had filed an injunction against the perpetrator, but it was not heard in time.

“The injunction was scheduled to be heard the day after the murder. And of course he killed her in the meantime, so there was no time for them to be heard”, laments Anthoula Anasoglou, a lawyer for the victims’ family. “He had been accused of domestic violence in 2021, but was never arrested in the context of self-incrimination. The police forces had a tolerant attitude towards the perpetrator. In fact, in the courtroom at the trial, a police witness admitted having told the man’s wife, on his release, ‘It’s okay, he loves you, he won’t hurt you’. And ‘It’s okay, they’re a couple, they’ll get back together’. The police witness said this in court and it caused a lot of tension”.

In small places where everyone knows each other, as in the case of Makrinitsa, police officers often go beyond their duties in domestic violence cases, explains the lawyer of the Tsapas family: “The police officers play the role of psychologists and try to reassure the woman, without understanding the seriousness of the situation. And for Konstantina it was just an inevitable spiral towards the void, like a thriller where you already know the ending. Photos in the days leading up to the killing showed her having been abused, she had a black eye. He had been cursing her, locking her up, there was endless violence. This had been going on for two years. He had beaten the brother and the parents before. For two years there was a systematic cover-up. It all pointed to a tragedy, and that’s what happened…”

The causes of a predictable crime

As shown in the cross-border investigation the Mediterranean Institute of Investigative Journalism (MIIR) coordinated in the context of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet) along with 18 media partners in order to gather updated data on the extent of gender-based violence in Europe, in Greece the pandemic period was characterised by a frightening increase of 110,2% in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90,4% in 2021, after 3,609 victims of physical violence were recorded in 2020, reaching 6,873 in 2021. Incidents of psychological violence in Greece increased from 2,906 to 5,350 during the period in question, and those of sexual violence increased from 69 to 141. Similar acts of physical, sexual, economic and psychological violence were experienced by thousands of women across Europe.

In Greece, the rise in domestic violence and femicide led the supreme court prosecutor Vassilis Pliotas to issue an encircular in November 2021. It called on prosecutors to intervene imminently, to further the process of arresting the presumed perpetrators of such crimes and for the related criminal cases to be heard as a matter of priority in court, so as to avoid all delays in delivering justice. 

Despite the Pliotas initiative, in practice the issues of both police protection and the administration of justice are not moving as fast as they should.

In domestic violence, most crimes – apart from rape and homicide – are misdemeanours, explains Kiki Petroulaki, which means that short suspended sentences are given. “This should be about the police arresting the perpetrator and the authorities punishing him immediately. Not the police arresting the perpetrator, the prosecutor letting him go and within two hours the perpetrator being able to return back home. The system has a big responsibility when it sees that there are older complaints against a perpetrator, and it does not take any action. Domestic and sexual violence is never an isolated incident, it repeats itself, with the same victims and different ones. This is an issue that has been discussed across Europe in recent years – the recurring pattern as a risk factor. It is also present in the Istanbul Convention, which aims to prevent violence against women and domestic violence. Having a previous record is an aggravating circumstance and should ring bells for the police and the public prosecutor’s office and make them respond more quickly. Putting someone in jail for a misdemeanour is almost impossible, even if they have four convictions in a row. But even if they were put in jail, I don’t think it would solve the problem of domestic violence.”

According to this experienced psychologist, who has been called upon to advise many female victims of domestic violence in Greece, it is clear what is needed: strict measures that will immediately remove from the perpetrator the ability to control the life of his victim, combined with systematic monitoring of the safety of victims and their children.

The Istanbul Convention includes many such provisions for the protection of domestic-violence survivors and children who are directly abused and/or exposed to their mother being abused. Unfortunately, our country chooses not to apply them, or even violates them in law. Examples include Articles 26, 31 and 45 of the convention, which aim to protect children, and Articles 48, 51, 52, 53 and 56, which focus on risk management to prevent recurrent victimisation. 

“The effective implementation of these and other provisions of the convention requires, for every reported case of domestic violence, an honest, immediate, coordinated, cross-sectoral response by police, justice and support services, both specialised and general. The European Anti-Violence Network is attempting to design this, alongside the authorities and using an exchange of good practices between Greece and Iceland within the framework of the “ACF project GR_IS_UnitedForDVSurvivors”, explains Kiki Petroulaki. She adds: “At the end of 2023 we will see whether the protection of women and children and the reduction of femicides is indeed a political priority – or whether the only thing that interests our country is not to ‘sound’ like we are violating European and international legislation and the human rights of survivors of domestic violence and their children.”

Among the data analysed as part of the MIIR-EDJNet investigation was the number of prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments of domestic violence perpetrators. This enables a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment for male perpetrators of domestic violence against women. From the available data collected in Greece for 2020 it is estimated that, relative to the number of perpetrators of domestic violence against women (4,436), the prosecution rate was 70.6% (3,132). Convictions account for 20.9% of these prosecutions, while imprisonment was a penalty in an estimated 13.7% of these convictions. However, comparing the number of offenders with the number of men imprisoned, it is estimated that for every 100 offenders recorded in 2020, only two were imprisoned. So overall, just 2% of perpetrators who used violence against female partners were imprisoned. 

It is worth noting that there are likely to be discrepancies in the data and that these percentages are entirely indicative. Indeed they may be overestimated, as the prosecutions brought in 2020 also relate to cases reported in 2019 or even 2018. However, they are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of male perpetrators of crimes of violence against women over a given period of time and they indicate a trend. Similarly, it is interesting to note the percentage of cases where prosecutions ceased due to a process of pre-trial agreement (21.7% and 33.4% of cases in 2020 and 2021 respectively), as well as the percentage of cases in which restraining orders were issued (from 0.6% to 1.6% of cases in 2016-2020).

On average, therefore, only 3% of men charged with domestic violence in Greece and 5% in Slovenia ended up in prison annually in the period 2016-2021. In contrast, in Spain the equivalent annual average figure for men prosecuted for domestic violence and ending up in jail was 30%.

Sentences and recognition of femicide

The Greek government recently moved to toughen up the penalties for perpetrators of domestic-violence crimes. But is this the solution?

“Tightening up sentences not only is not a panacea, but it seems ineffective. This does not mean that the punishment should not be proportional to the gravity of the act. But, in itself, a strict sentence is not enough to deter the perpetrator or to reaffirm citizens’ trust in institutions and the administration of justice”, says Chara Chioni-Chotouman, a lawyer at the Diotima Centre for Gender Rights and Equality. She also stresses that the failure to properly implement the law risks renders “the response to crime meaningless”, and adds that the frequency of violence against women shows that Greece needs to reassess its attitude to such crime, by recognising femicide. However, she points out that the most immediate need is to “update the protection tools by, for example, tightening rules for those who violate decisions which are intended to protect the victim and prevent crimes of violence“.

In an article last October, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made it clear that he had no intention of legally recognising femicide in Greece, but promised to do everything possible to restrict the phenomenon. Among other things, he referred to the establishment of 18 police “Domestic Violence Offices”, charged with managing incidents and providing information to victims. However, cases of understaffing have been reported in those offices, as well as behaviour by officials that discouraged women from reporting.

“There are ongoing trainings for police officers to better manage incidents of gender and domestic violence,” argues the deputy minister for Demography, Family Policy and Gender Equality, Maria Syrengela, adding that the legislative framework can only partly contribute to the prevention and deterrence of violence against women. However, when it comes to the legalisation of femicide, she says that “it is not a question of what to call these crimes against women but more importantly to focus on prevention and to put an end to the attitudes that allow abusive behaviours”. 

The picture is very different in Cyprus where femicide was recognised in July 2022 as an offence in its own right, following a proposal by the then speaker of the Cypriot parliament, Annita Demetriou.

Speaking to MIIR, Ms Demetriou, who is the first woman to occupy her position in Cyprus, said the term “femicide” does not negate the term homicide, but rather has a complementary and reinforcing effect: “In order to have an effective response we must first of all call a spade a spade. This is precisely why we insist on the importance of the term femicide, because it encodes, signifies and names the most extreme form of gender violence – and any modern self-respecting society must admit that victims of domestic and sexual violence, victims of misogyny, victims of intimate partner violence, victims of ‘honour’ crimes or crimes over religious beliefs – these victims are women, not men. Therefore, the establishment of femicide as a specific offence – as opposed to the common-law crime of homicide – emphasises the intensity, origin and cause of the crime. There is therefore a need for legal separation. At the same time, another valuable aspect is added to the toolbox for eradicating the phenomenon: the possibility of an official record of femicide.”

As the MIIR data investigation has demonstrated, there is a significant pan-European data gap in terms of the actual number of femicides in the first place, but also of female victims of physical, sexual, psychological and economic violence. There is also significant uncertainty over the number of perpetrators of these crimes. In Greece and across Europe, experts and women’s groups who advocate the recognition of femicide as an offence, stress that this may be the only way to tackle underreporting of crimes that kill and harm thousands of women every year.

The data resulting from this project, as well as the findings on the institutional gaps in prevention and support for victims and on the administration of justice, show that the undeclared war against women in Europe will not stop until citizens and politicians face up to the problem. There is a need to invest financially and qualitatively in strengthening the system of protection for women and vulnerable groups. Laws need to be implemented, and young people need to be better educated on gender equality and gender relations. This would at least be a small tribute to the women who have lost their lives to crimes that could have been prevented. 

Research-Text: Kostas Zafeiropoulos, Nikos Morfonios, Janine Louloudi (MIIR)

Data analysis-visualization: Korina Petridi

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

“It’s been 8 months since the last time I got my medicine, I can’t find it anywhere no matter how far I’ve searched. It used to be a so-called rare drug, but now it has become a non-existent one” says 25-year-old Eleftheria. She suffers from a rare form of rickets, which is a metabolic disease of the bones. “I was told to search for it in a warehouse in the center of Athens, but I didn’t find it there either. Pharmacists advise me to be patient. There is no replacement. This situation is very serious for me, I have severe pains and my whole body is straining,” says Eleftheria to MIIR.

In Europe, about 25 million people suffer from a rare disease. The drugs that are needed are called “orphans” because they are not usually adopted by the research programs of the pharmaceutical industry. In Greece, however, as in many European countries, the shortages no longer concern only rare diseases but regular consumed ones, such as antibiotics, respiratory and cardiovascular drugs.

MIIR jointly with the collaborating journalistic teams of the EDJNET searched for data and managed to create a – as homogenized as possible – database of medicine shortages in Europe. We recorded 22,107 different entries over a five-year period (2018-2023) in a total of 9 European countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Greece, Romania, Austria, and Belgium). This research indicates that Greece is one of the countries that declared the lowest shortages in absolute number during the last five years. At the same time, however, the Greek official data show that even for these few – in relation to the real depiction – Greece has the longest median duration of shortages. 

In the latest related announcement of the Greek National Organization for Medicines (EOF) 148 medicine shortages are reported. ‘’There are much more but they report less. I am just indicatively saying that EOF issued a press release in September 2022 where it was mentioned that in terms of shortages we were in a better era than in 2019. We have already reported for over a year that we have much more (shortages)’’, says Ilias Giannoglou, a Board Member of Athens Pharmaceutical Association. 

According to this Association there were over 400 medicines in shortage in mid March 2023.

“EOF is clueless in terms of shortages. It doesn’t know the market. It does not know which warehouses are exporting and which are not. This year was one of the worst, if not the worst ” adds the president of Athens Pharmaceutical Association, Konstantinos Lourantos. The interview at his pharmacy was interrupted by a customer. We heard him say (Lourantos): “this is in short supply, I had 10 boxes, I gave them all today; maybe you will find somewhere, although I think it would be very difficult”. He then turned to us: “Here is a man who tries to find an antibiotic for his child but there is no Augmentin. I had taken many boxes, some 50, I collected them as if I knew, but now I don’t have any. I mean, if I don’t have it, meaning a pharmacist who had stored a lot, who will?” Lourantos wonders.

The CEO of the Greek pharmaceutical companies Uni-Pharma & InterMed and also SG of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, Ioulia Tseti, considers the under-registration as given. She highlights to MIIR the typical example of “paracetamol, the lack of which this year, had not been officially notified to the Greek National Organization for Medicines (EOF). This fact is due to the circumstance, that many multinational companies do not inform the Agency and prefer instead to pay the relevant fines. Unfortunately, the Agency does not work proactively in our country and in the interest of public health, except when the private sector appears. And the private sector unfortunately works -with very few exceptions- at its own interest’’.

We contacted the President of the EOF, D. Filippou and repeatedly sent our written questions to the organization without receiving any response until the publication of the present.

The Greek “paradox”

The production and distribution of pharmaceutical products is one of the most dynamic branches of the Greek industry. Based on the latest research by the Foundation for Economic & Industrial Research (IOBE) on behalf of the Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies (SFEE), in 2020 the sales of drugs in pharmacies and drugstores amounted to €4.6 billion, increased by 3.7% compared to 2019, while the sales in the hospitals and pharmacies amounted to €2.4 billion to be increased by 5.0%.

Drug sales have increased by 80% during the last five years, reaching a €3 billion in 2021. According to the Prodcom (Eurostat) survey, pharmaceutical production in Greece in value (ex-factory) approached €1.7 billion in 2020, increased by €287 million compared to 2019, while compared to the average term of the period 2010-2017 is strengthened by 82%. In addition, drug exports in 2020 increased by 48.3% compared to 2019.

So, if all these indicators are positive, why are there so many medicine shortages?

“There are two reasons: one is, the reduced import of products from some multinationals which are obviously not interested in the Greek market. By an audit we carried out over the last three years, we found out that many multinational companies imported smaller quantities of certain products,” mentions to MIIR the general secretary of the Panhellenic Association of Drugstores, Irini Markaki. And she adds, “the second reason- a very important one indeed-is the illegal export- please pay attention because there is also a legal one – that is done by some, in collaboration with pharmacies and some astute people who collect them”.

According to the analysis of MIIR, it appears that the main causes of the drug shortages in Greece for 2022 are manufacturing or product quality problems (45.3%),  supply chain delays (33.7%) and increased demand (14%) 

Shady dealers and the hoovering

These drugstores usually buy with cash from some pharmacies and then export directly to other countries. According to Ms Markaki, the problem was created during  MoU austerity years in Greece, because of the OECD toolbox that allowed the creation of such ‘’monkey business’’-pharmaceutical warehouses. 

“They create a Private Capital Company and they get easily an approval from the Greek National Organization for Medicines -because they include, for example, a refrigerator- however, without having a high stock of drugs and without having large spaces, while a wholesale pharmaceutical warehouse requires very large spaces. And what do they do? They go and collect medicines from the pharmacies (so in the market they call this “hoovering”) and then they export them, they sell them to each other, they ‘’clean’’ them, they sell them to large pharmaceutical warehouses that export at the end. Or they sell them in black market outside Greece. There, a great deal of damage is done both to the Greek State and to the public health of whatever State they will end up in, because we don’t know under which conditions they are transferred.”

In mid-winter, EOF imposed a temporary lock down on 3 pharmaceutical warehouses that refused inspection. 

However, this is also considered completely insufficient. “A short while ago, the Minister of Health, Mr. Th. Pleuris, issued an announcement about a pharmacy in Athens that had been locked down because the owners refused the inspection. This is not enough, however, as it has been observed that often companies can and do reopen, simply with a different name”, states Ilias Giannoglou of the Athens Pharmaceutical Association.
In fact, those who are “caught in the act” quickly open a new “second chance” warehouse with a different name, just paying a low fee to the Greek state.

However, apart from illegal exports, pharmaceutical manufacturers, traders and pharmacists agree that the low price of the medicine in Greece is part of the problem.

It is noted that only 34% of the total amount of medicines consumed in the country are produced by domestic factories. As Ilias Giannoglou explains, “Greek pharmaceutical companies mainly produce generics. The ones that are exported are the originals. They are multinationals which are imported and re-exported. For example, a company’s insulin comes from Denmark and the company imports 300 pieces and channels them to the Greek market. However, an imported drug is sold by the pharmacy with a multiple profit abroad, than if it is distributed within the country”.

On the other hand, the powerful pharmaceutical industry in Greece – usually immune to the press criticism due to high advertising expenditure – also has a shared responsibility. Despite the inadequacy of checks by the EOF on drugstores, pharmaceutical companies often do not disclose in real time the quantities of drugs they distribute per pharmacy. Some companies do not even disclose the period of the actual shortage, which is critical information needed by legal pharmacies, pharmacies and certainly patients. 

In addition, according to the president of the Panhellenic Pharmaceutical Association, Apostolos Valtas,  “fake shortages are created at the responsibility of companies at critical time periods as a bargaining tool to put pressure on the price committee in order to achieve better pricing.”

Under the legislative framework, pharmaceutical companies must have 3 months’ stock (plus 25% for foreigners and tourists) and any shortages must be declared 3 months in advance. “No company does that. And companies have never been audited or fined for that. Let’s not fool ourselves. The pharmaceutical industry always has a huge power towards any government and has a lot of money to push to the market, either directly or indirectly” says Irini Markaki to MIIR.

The blame game among the key players of the pharmaceutical industry can last forever. At the same time, however,  people in need of their medicines feel more insecure. 

Eleftheria had not managed to find her medicine until the publication of the present. As a substitute, she takes another drug that does not fully aplly to a proper treatment, while following the advice of her endocrinologist, she has adjusted her diet to cover the substances she is lacking.

Less money for health

The total funding for health expenditure in Greece fell by 25.9% in the period 2010-2020, while in the EU it increased by 20.7% in the same time period (source: IOBE, SFEE, The pharmaceutical market in Greece: Facts & figures 2021). The public out-of-hospital pharmaceutical expenditure suffered a significant decrease of 60.8% in the period 2009-2021. The funding decrease for health expenditure in Greece is in an opposite direction from the whole EU, but also from the southern Mediterranean countries subset.

The government, unable or unwilling to control the situation, often throws the ball of blame to doctors and patients. Indicative was the statement of the Minister of Health, Thanos Pleuris at the beginning of this year: “some parents buy more non-prescription drugs and doctors may sometimes prescribe antibiotics in excess, providing an incentive for people to stock medecins at home due to fear of shortages”. This statement provoked intense reactions from the opposition and many pharmaceutical associations.

Medicines may indeed be cheaper in Greece compared to the European average (although the continuous decline in purchasing power must be taken into account), may the EU indeed urgently need a bold patient-centred policy based on its needs of public health with the return of production to its territory, but it is the responsibility of the Greek State and the government to ensure transparency in the data of deficiencies and accountability throughout the chain of the pharmaceutical industry.

Before the shortages peak and before accusing parents of stocking medicines, many other actions should have been taken: preventive measures, transparent information with harmonized and detailed benchmarks, imposing deterrent sanctions on pharmaceutical companies and traders and banning parallel exports in time and for as long as it takes. To the question why this measure is almost always imposed with delay or not at all, a probable answer is that no government wants to reduce the index of exports, which add turnover to the country’s GDP.

As for the patients, especially for those who don’t trust the generics, as usual they are asked to bear the consequences through alchemy and prayers.

Read the first part of the MIIR investigation:  (Why) Europe is running out of Meds

Authors: Janine Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios, Kostas Zafeiropoulos (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualisations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

Visualisations: Corina Petridi

“It’s a very bad feeling, I haven’t gotten over it. You are not safe anywhere. You feel that nobody understands you, nobody wants to deal with you, nobody cares about your problem. Did you get away? Good. You didn’t? God rest her soul, we’ll cry about it on the news and that’s the end of it. One victim, then another, and another, and on and on. I have to admit to you that if I hadn’t left, I might have been one of them.”

This is how Eleni says she feels when she hears about each new femicide in the news. Divorced and the mother of a young child, she is a survivor of abuse. First, gross economic abuse in her marriage and then serious physical abuse at the hands of a colleague who insisted that he be her partner. Wearing the mask of someone who would help her through a difficult financial period, he approached her and then, when she refused to have a relationship with him, began stalking her as in a horror movie, going so far as to attack her in her home. 

That first time she ended up badly beaten in hospital, where she was urged by the staff to go to the police and press charges against him. Before she was able to do so, he visited her again at her home. And that is when “the terrible ordeal began”, she explains to MIIR. “I would call the police to my house, have them remove him, and then he would come back two days later. Broken cell phones, changing SIM cards, having no contact with anyone. Closed shutters, not being able to go to the supermarket or to work or anywhere, because he was stalking me, he would come to my house, anywhere I went.“

Eleni – who hides her real name for her safety, as the perpetrator is still at large and looking for her – lived through a six-month nightmare in which her stalker imposed a reign of terror on her in her home, self-servingly playing the role of her partner, controlling every aspect of her life by means of threats and physical violence.

In desperation, she began to secretly look for a way to escape with her young child: “I found closed doors everywhere. When I called a women’s support line, I was told: ‘You need to get an injunction and then we will put you on a list that says you have indeed been abused. There is a long wait. Only then can we deal with the question of your escape.’ Yes, I said, but if I press charges and police officers come, then who will save me from him after that? ‘Look’, they said, ‘there is nothing else that can be done’. I also approached the church, the attitude was the same, even worse… ‘It’s not their business… They can’t do anything’“.

Eleni is a prime example of a woman who, while completely isolated, with no support network, lost her independence overnight at the hands of an abusive man. Similar incidents of physical, sexual, economic and psychological violence were experienced by thousands of women in Europe during the pandemic. During that period there was an increase in violence against women in a number of European countries, as we reported in the first part of MIIR’s cross-border investigation with the European Data Journalism Network in collaboration with 18 news organisations, including iMEdD Lab, Deutsche Welle, El Confidencial, Civio, and OBCT.

Based on the data gathered by participating newsrooms, Greece showed the highest increase in femicides (187.5%), with 8 femicides officially recorded in 2020 and 23 in 2021.

This was the largest increase for 2021 among the countries for which enough data was available (Cyprus, Hungary, Italy, Serbia, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden), in order to calculate this indicator on the basis of the index of femicides maintained by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). When comparing the two years of the pandemic with 2019, the result is a significant increase in officially recorded femicides in Greece, Slovenia, Germany and Italy.

In Greece, the pandemic period was also marked by a frightening 110,2% increase in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90,4% in 2021. Specifically, in 2020 there were 3,609 victims of physical violence recorded, rising to 6,873 in 2021. During this same period, the victims of psychological violence increased from 2,906 to 5,350, and those of sexual violence from 69 to 141.

Speaking to MIIR, Cristina Fabre Rosell, Gender-based Violence Team Leader at the European Institute for Gender Equality, reminds that this form of violence “has its roots in gender inequalities and power imbalances in relationships. Femicide is the most extreme form of this power-based violence and remains one of the most widespread human-rights violations”. In a recent report, EIGE presented its Gender Equality Index for 2022. In this ranking Greece has consistently ranked last. Despite an improvement over the last decade, Greece remains a laggard among EU countries, at 15.2 points below the European average.

The Gender Equality Index also takes into account the handling of violence against women in the EU member states. During the pandemic, countries with higher positions in the index seemed better prepared to manage the extraordinary circumstances that exacerbated the risk for women.

“Very few member states – Ireland, Spain and Lithuania – adopted a comprehensive national policy or action plan to address the potential for violence by intimate partners in the context of Covid-19. Spain, for example, had a good contingency plan with many measures for intimate-partner violence, and also for several vulnerable groups such as women in prostitution or homeless women. Three other member states – the Czech Republic, Latvia and Poland – provided specific guidelines. In most states the measures that were strengthened were support lines or mobile apps for contacting the police, but not any increase in the provision of shelters,” explains Fabre Rosell.

Data collected for the MIIR data investigation reveal a pan-European increase in calls from victims of domestic violence or third parties to national support lines, such as the SOS 15900 hotline in Greece. The largest increase in calls occurred in the first year of the pandemic in Cyprus, with Italy, Greece and Austria just behind.

According to Greece’s deputy minister for labour and social affairs, Maria Syrengela, phone calls about incidents of domestic violence almost quadrupled during lockdowns. She interprets this as an indication that “many of the victims are no longer afraid to speak out and disclose incidents of violence, as they know that both society and the state are by their side.” In this context she mentions that the General Secretariat for Demographic Policy & Gender Equality operates a network of 44 counselling centres and 19 shelters.

The minister says that “never has a woman victim of violence who had to be removed from an abusive environment, been left outside the government structures“. According to official figures, the total availability in the shelters is about 400 beds. Data provided by the General Secretariat for Demography and Family Policy and Gender Equality shows that 244 women were accommodated in 2020, 218 in 2021, and 200 in 2022 (from January to October).

Dr Kiki Petroulaki, psychologist and chair of the board of the European Anti-Violence Network, explains that things are not that simple. For a woman in danger to be protected, it is not enough for her to just speak out. She needs to have her needs addressed seriously, both at the moment she calls for help and during the next steps. “If she is in danger when she calls, they will tell her to call the police. It’s fine if she ends up at the police station alone, but if she has a child, two children – where will she sleep at night? She will go back again. If she’s looking for shelter, she’ll be told the nearest counselling centre to get an appointment. At the shelter she can stay for three months with the possibility of extending to three more. Usually at the time the request is made, she is told the process she needs to follow, what medical tests she and her children need to do, and, if these appear alright, they will then look into which shelter in Greece might have a place. Women with children who are interested in a shelter are put off as soon as they hear about the time limit. Because if you have children and no job or support network, the three months and six months are prohibitive. If you leave the shelter after three or six months, what do you do then? Do you go back to where you were? This is something that deters too many women.”

Escape and the day after, for victims of violence

For Eleni, salvation came when she managed to get in touch with the European Anti-Violence Network, which still supports her with counselling in cooperation with “the Smile of the Child” ngo. This enabled her to find more permanent accommodation, where she currently stays with her young child. “After all this abuse, you feel as if you are reborn. The door to the new home was a security door, and it made me feel so safe”, says Eleni.

Today, however, she remains unemployed. Finding a job is not easy with a young child. Her single-parent family relies on the help of ngo’s to make ends meet. Help from the state is meagre: “I get an allowance. It used to be €300 for six months – €200 for the adult and €100 for the child. That’s what it was during the pandemic. And now it has become €80 and €80 respectively, a total of €160. It’s not enough.” 

As Kiki Petroulaki explains, without consistent and adequate financial support it is extremely difficult for women – especially when they have children – to escape the abusive environment they find themselves in. Especially since the child benefit for single-parent families in Greece was recently reduced significantly. “This is a major problem. The welfare state considers that a mother with one child can live on €300 per month and, therefore, any additional income, from any source, is deducted on her next application so that her annual income does not exceed €3,600 – and that’s if the mother meets the strict conditions to be eligible for the official minimum guaranteed income.”

“Female victims of domestic violence need a holistic framework of protection. These are women who have usually been trapped for a long time in a cycle of violence and abuse and need a more systematic and sensitised approach,” says Chara Chioni-Chotouman, a lawyer at the Diotima Centre for Gender Rights and Equality, which offers legal and psycho-social support, as well as job counselling for women who are trying to escape abuse and reclaim their autonomy by entering the workforce.

Just a few weeks ago the GREVIO committee completed an official visit to Athens. This committee represents the independent authority that monitors the implementation of the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on violence against women. The visit was in the framework of its first assessment carried out in Greece and its results and recommendations are expected in the coming months. The government presented Greece’s initiatives to address violence against women, while the members of the committee also met with representatives of women’s organisations and other NGOs. There they discussed the incomplete implementation of the Istanbul Convention, and main problems which include: the increase in domestic violence and femicides, the inadequate support network for women victims of abuse, as well as the lack of a targeted support network for the most vulnerable women (such as disabled, Roma, LGBT, and migrant women) and for children. They also talked about issues arising from Greece’s Family Law Reform Act on children and abused women, and the need for systematic training to prevent gender-based violence and to better protect victims. 

There are still many steps to be taken in order to achieve a safer institutional framework for the prevention of violence against women and the support of victims. In the meantime, solutions must be found for women like Eleni, who managed to find a way out. “I never expected in my life that a front door could bring out so many emotions. Knowing you’re going to a safe home gives you great strength. It’s what you need. You feel that you’re not alone.”

Investigation ID

This cross-border data-based investigation was organised and coordinated by the Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Journalism (MIIR.gr) within the framework of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet). Data analysis and visualisations was conducted by iMEdD Lab (incubator for Media Education and Development). Data analysis check was performed by Kelly Kiki (iMEdD Lab). Korina Petridi contributed to visualizations for this article.

14 more EDJNet members participated in this investigation, which was conducted from October 2022 to February 2023:  Deutsche Welle (Germany), Openpolis, OBC Transeuropa (Italy), Civio, El Confidencial (Spain), Divergente (Portugal), CINS (Serbia), Pod črto (Slovenia), BIQdata/Gazeta Wyborcza, Frontstory.pl (Poland), Deník Referendum (Czech Republic), EUrologus/HVG (Hungary), PressOne (Romania), Journalism++ (Sweden). Three more media teams contributed data from their respective countries: Noteworthy (Ireland), Investigace (Czech Republic) and Atlatszo (Hungary).

The investigation has been published in three parts on miir.gr and EfSyn Newspaper.

Read in part 1: Femicide and the rise of violence against women during the pandemic

 Read in part 3: A systemic failure to prevent femicides

Authors: Janine Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios, Kostas Zafeiropoulos (MIIR)

Data Analysis – Visualizations:  Thanasis Troboukis (iMΕdDLab)

Illustration: Louiza Karageorgiou

“Every time it happens, you relive it. It’s terrible. I always think, ‘Oh that mother, that father, what they have to go through’.” For Katerina Koti, the mother of 31-year-old Dora Zacharia, who was murdered in Rhodes in September 2021 by her ex-boyfriend a few days after their breakup, each new femicide announcement is another small tragedy. Dora was the 11th victim that year, in a list that was destined to grow considerably…

In the middle of last summer, three women lost their lives in less than 48 hours in different corners of Greece at the hands of their partners. On July 31, 2022, a man stabbed his wife to death in Rethymno when she asked him for a divorce. The next day in Zakynthos, another man savagely beat his wife and then killed her with a knife. A few hours before her murder, the woman had gone to the local police station to file another complaint against him, after he had beaten her again. Just hours later, a 17-year-old girl in Peristeri would become the youngest female murder victim.

This kind of “epidemic” of murders of women by their current or former partners is the culmination of a trend that has long plagued Greece and seems to have intensified during the recent pandemic. And not just Greece: in Spain there were four murders of women in different cities in one day at the beginning of the year. Similar grim reports are arriving from other European countries, fuelling the debate on whether femicide should be recognised as a crime in its own right. So far only two European states, Cyprus and Malta, have ventured to take this step.

But what is happening in reality? Has there been an increase in the number of women murdered in recent years by male partners or family members? Is this development consistent with a wider increase in gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence, during the pandemic period? Has there really been an increase in femicide rates in Europe? And which countries are having the most difficulty in curbing violence against women?

The MIIR – EDJNet cross-border data investigation

The answers to these questions are not easy to find, as no official data has been published at a European Union level for the period after 2018. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which is in charge of conducting research and monitoring policies on violence against women, launched a survey in 2020, but the results are not expected to be published before 2024. This means that the EU will not have a full picture of what has been happening in a crucial area affecting half of its population for a period of around five years!

MIIR, together with a total of 18 European media outlets, including Deutsche Welle, El Confidencial, Civio, OBCT and others, within the framework of EDJNet, attempted to generate the most up to date map of violence against women in Europe today. By requesting statistical figures from the competent national authorities for the years 2010-2021, MIIR created a new database which contains important findings for the direction of gender-based violence in European countries. With the contribution of iMEdD Lab the data was analyzed, focusing on the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The research was based on two primary data sources. The first of these are the EIGE indicators for recording intimate partner violence against women and femicide by male perpetrators, as included in the 2021 Gender Equality Report, which includes data up to 2018. EIGE defines “intimate partner violence” as any act of physical, sexual, psychological or economic violence that occurs between former or current spouses or partners, regardless of whether they live in the same house. The teams participating in the investigation sought and contributed as up-to-date data as possible, which was audited based on EIGE guidelines. 

Regarding “Femicide”, it is worth mentioning that EIGE adopts the statistical definition of “the killing of a woman by an intimate partner and the death of a woman as a result of a practice that is harmful to women”, and places crimes pertaining to these characteristics to “Indicator 9” which measures the deaths of female femicide victims aged 18 and older. In Greece there is no specific law for the criminal prosecution of the act of femicide, and so the phenomenon is monitored in the country through the collection of data regarding the female victims of intentional homicide, while the relationship with the perpetrator is generated in combination with the law for the handling of domestic violence.

As a second source and tool for informal “verification” of the results, Eurostat databases were used, providing data for the crimes of intentional homicides, rapes and sexual assaults, where the perpetrator is a partner or family member, up until 2020, as well as some details on the criminal sanctions against perpetrators. In the case of Greece, data was collected from the General Secretariat for Gender Equality, which in turn collected data from the Hellenic Police and the ministry of Justice. Along with Slovenia, Greece was one of the countries that contributed data in most categories. But the hidden picture behind these is quite dark. 

The data black hole on gender-based violence in the EU

Following the contribution of new data, on the basis of the first data source, the total number of femicides from 2010 to 2021 in the 20 countries providing data is estimated at 3232 – although no data is available for eight countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Ireland, Romania). However, the above figure is a sign of serious indications of underreporting by the police authorities. This is because, at the same time, Eurostat data shows 6593 intentional homicides of women in Europe between 2011-2021, including 4208 by partners and 2385 by relatives (the figures for 20 countries: Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden).

Both for our research and for policymaking, the lack of up-to-date data is a major limitation. The EDJNet teams collectively discovered significant gaps in the publishing of recent data by state actors. Adding to this is the lack of data with similar, and thus comparable characteristics. “No score is given to the EU in the domain of violence, due to a lack of comparable EU-wide data,” claims EIGE, which is looking for ways to overcome this obstacle. Despite these hurdles, the data now included in MIIR’s primary database yields important findings on the recent direction of gender-based violence in Europe and Greece. 

Explosion of femicides in Greece

For more reliable results, due to both incomplete data and different methods of recording femicides based on the EIGE index from country to country, a choice was made to compare not absolute numbers but rather the percentage change in femicides between years, for those countries with available data. In addition, the data was extrapolated to comparable rates per 100,000 population.

Greece had the highest increase in femicides in 2021 with an increase of 187.5%, from 8 incidents in 2020 to 23 in 2021. Sweden also took a “leap” with a 120% increase in femicides in 2018 compared to 2017, while Estonia and Slovenia saw a 100% increase in 2015 and 2020 respectively. Comparing the two-year pandemic with 2019 shows that Greece, Slovenia, Germany and Italy saw a significant increase in femicides.

For the purposes of the investigation the participating teams also collected data from unofficial sources, such as local monitoring groups for the recording of femicides. Such organizations mostly monitor media coverage with the aim of countering the underreporting of violence against women. This choice was made in order to compare the official number of femicides with the unofficial one.

‘We are not claiming that we are keeping an accurate count of femicides, but we are trying to demonstrate the necessity of open data. The issue of violence during the pandemic is very complex and not temporary. Based on the data we have from 2019 to 2022 we observe a persistence of the phenomenon,” says Athena Pegglidou, who founded the Greek section of the European Observatory on Femicide. For 2020 and 2021,the unofficial number of recorded femicides collected by the Observatory was higher in Greece than the official state number, by 2.4 times in 2020 and 1.4 times in 2021 respectively. In Serbia, the unofficial number of femicides collected by the NGO Autonomous Women’s Centre was almost 1.5 times higher than the official number. 

Examining Eurostat data on intentional homicides of women by men, partners or relatives, a similar increase of 156% in 2021 compared to 2020 is confirmed for Greece. The analysis further shows that Slovenia had a 100% increase in the first year of the pandemic in homicides of women by intimate partners and relatives compared to 2019. Croatia, Austria and Hungary followed with increases of 55.6%, 28.6% and 26.1% respectively.

Cristina Fabre Rosell works as Gender-based Violence Team Leader at the European Institute for Gender Equality, and explains that during the first lockdown of the pandemic there was a relative decrease in the number of femicide incidents, but the risk lingered: 

“Women were not at risk of femicide during the pandemic because they were stuck with the perpetrator, and therefore the perpetrator felt more confident. All the power and control was in his hands. She had nowhere to go, so she had no exit. So the intimate partner violence increased, but not the more severe form that is worse, femicide. What was more worrying for us were the measures that were to be established after the lockdown. How were we going to protect all these women that were running away from their perpetrators. And so our fear was that the severe form of intimate partner violence that is intimate femicide could increase after the release of the lockdown measures. This has happened in some member states. But we are still not able to see if this is a common pattern that happened across all EU member states, and to what extent we can say that it’s a result of these measures. We don’t have evidence. But we hope that with the collection of data on intimate partner femicide across the years, perhaps we will be able to build the evidence”.

As the figures from this data-driven investigation show, this was the case in 2021 in several countries, most notably Greece.

Increase in violence against women

The words of EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader are confirmed by the analysis of other EIGE indicators on physical, psychological, economic and sexual violence. The figures in the following graph show the variation in the number of victims of each type of violence in recent years.

In Greece, the pandemic period was marked by a frightening 110.2% increase in victims of physical violence in 2020 and 90.4% in 2021. Specifically, in 2020, 3609 victims of physical violence were recorded, while in 2021 the number reached 6873. Meanwhile, the number of victims of sexual violence increased from 69 to 141. 

In parallel, the widened use of the internet and the increase in online abuse, led to an 84.1% rise in victims of psychological violence in the country, reaching the number of 2906 victims in 2020, only to register another rise by 104.6% and reach 5350 victims in 2021. “I do think that we are now kind of conceptualizing psychological violence and people are more aware of what psychological violence is, and the huge impact that psychological violence has. I do think that this is probably the trend that we are seeing, more victims are aware of ‘this is unacceptable, this is an offense, this is violence’, EIGE’s Gender-based Violence Team Leader explains.  

According to EIGE, at least 44% of women in Europe have been subjected to psychological violence at some point by a partner. However, there do seem to be countries that have managed to slow its spread, such as Serbia and Germany, where the increase was limited to 3.4% and 1.5% respectively in the first year of the pandemic.

There are but a few reports about enforcing economic violence against women (this is the suffocating financial control or financial bleeding that a man may exert towards his current or former partner). Of the ten countries reporting it, six saw an increase and four a decrease from 2015 to 2018. Finland had the highest average increase at 33.4%, followed by the Czech Republic at 26.6%, Germany at 12.2%, Austria at 8.4%, Spain at 6.0% and Latvia at 4.6%. On the other hand, Belgium recorded an average decrease of -0.1%, Malta a decrease of -2.7%, Slovakia a decrease of -12.1% and Serbia a decrease of -18.1%.

In regard with the sexual violence indicator, Greece, Serbia and Slovenia showed significant increases in the years of the pandemic. In particular, sexual violence in Greece increased by 115.6% in 2020 and 104.3% in 2021. In Serbia it increased by 76.0% in 2021, after a decrease of -52.6% in 2020, while in Slovenia it increased by 64.3% in 2020 and 17.4% in 2021. Germany showed an increase of 8.0% in 2020, while Hungary also noted an increase of 20.8% in 2020, but posted a shift of -6.3% in 2021.

Based on Eurostat data, Hungary and Greece recorded the largest increases in reported rapes of women in 2020, with 41.2% and 36.5%, respectively, followed by Romania and Slovenia. Overall, Sweden leads the way with 135 victims of rape and 197 victims of sexual assault per 100,000 female population between 2015 and 2020 (note that in Sweden the definition of rape was widened in 2013, and again in 2018 and this could be affecting figures). Denmark, France and Finland follow with 54, 47 and 41 victims of rape per 100,000 female population, respectively. In terms of sexual assaults, France, Denmark, Germany and Finland have the highest rates.

The negligence of law enforcement authorities that costs lives

Konstantina Tsapa was murdered on April 5, 2021 with a knife by her estranged husband in the village of Makrinitsa, in Pelion near Volos. On that day, inside her parents’ house, the perpetrator also murdered her brother Giorgo Tsapas. Four days earlier the killer had again violently attacked the mother of his child and her parents in the same house. Similar violent incidents had been repeated several times by the same perpetrator, but despite appeals to the police, lawsuits and a request for an injunction, the perpetrator had not spent a single night in custody.

“In the quarrel in Makrinitsa before the murder, he had come to the house and beat all three of us – me, my wife and my late daughter. Then the police took him away, to the police station, kept him there for two-three hours. But they let him go, and they told me, ‘we cannot hold him anymore’,” a devastated Apostolos Chapas told MIIR. He had seen his two children murdered before his eyes.

“The police forces had a tolerant attitude towards the perpetrator,” says Anthoula Anasoglou, an advocate for the victims’ family. “He had also been charged with domestic violence in 2021. But he was never arrested. In fact, during the trial, a police witness admitted that the police had released him a few days earlier, saying ‘Okay, they are a couple, they will get back together’.”

Dora Zacharia was unaware in 2021 that her then partner and later murderer had previously been prosecuted for illegal violence and carrying a weapon after an incident in which he had threatened his former partner. The misdemeanor offense of unlawful violence had been dropped due to the expiry of the offense, while he had received a two-month prison sentence with a three-year suspension for the offense of unlawful carrying of weapons. Another former partner, a victim of physical violence, had also filed a complaint against him, but the injunction was not heard in time.

Dora Zacharia was the 11th victim of femicide for 2021. She was murdered in Rhodes by her former partner a few days after their separation.

“Dora paid for this delay with her life. We lost our child unjustly,” commented Katerina Koti, mother of the 31-year-old teacher who was murdered in 2021, to MIIR.

The available data collected in Greece for 2020 shows that of the 4436 perpetrators of domestic violence against women, 70.6% (3132) were prosecuted. Of these, 20.9% were convicted, but only 13.7% of those convicted went to prison. However, comparing the number of offenders with the number of men imprisoned, it is estimated that for every 100 offenders recorded in 2020 only 2 – a 2% percentage – were recorded as ending up in prison.

It is worth noting that the absolute figures may not fully reflect the situation in the reference year and that there may be anomalies in the data. For example, the registration of an offender in 2020 does not mean that the offense was committed in 2020, and similarly the imprisonment of an offender in 2020 does not mean that he committed the offense in the same year. For this reason, these rates are a relative estimate of the relationship between prosecutions and imprisonment of perpetrators of crimes of violence against women, recorded in a given time period, and should be interpreted as an indicator of a trend.

On average, annually, only 3% of men prosecuted for domestic violence in Greece and 5% in Slovenia ended up in prison. In contrast, in Spain, the average annual percentage of men prosecuted for domestic violence who ended up in prison was 30%, respectively.

Dora Zacharias’ mother is now a frequent participant in anti-femicide events, along with the mothers of other murdered women. Together they are urgently calling for changes in the way the state and society as a whole deal with violence against women and perpetrators of domestic violence.

In a historic decision on 22 February, after 6 years of delays due to constant opposition from various member states, the European Council decided that the EU should accede to the Istanbul Convention as a transnational entity. This follows the agreement of the European Parliament, which had previously called for violence against women to be included in the list of recognised crimes in the EU. In force since 2014 – and ratified in Greece since 2018 – the convention is the first legally binding international text that sets criteria for the prevention of gender-based violence in the EU, and could serve as a guide for follow-up initiatives by Brussels.

However, on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the European Commission had asked the European Parliament to adopt as soon as possible a proposed directive submitted last March to combat violence against women and domestic violence. Among other things, the directive aims to enshrine in EU legislation minimum standards for criminalising certain forms of violence against women; protecting victims and improving access to justice; supporting victims and ensuring coordination between relevant services; and work on prevention.

The directive also proposes that data collection should finally be made compulsory throughout the EU. The extent of violence against women is underreported and under-communicated, and, as noted, the data is not easily comparable between EU countries. In fact, the directive mentions that the last relevant pan-European survey was published in 2014.

The results of the cross-border data investigation carried out by MIIR and EDJNet add substance to the aforementioned. It took a total of 19 European teams of journalists and four months of searching for up-to-date data from the relevant national authorities of at least 22 countries, in order to show whether there was an increase in femicides and violence against women during the pandemic. Some teams succeeded in obtaining new and comparable data, others did not. 

It is clear in any case that without a common European system for the recording of violence against women and the strengthening of the victims protection system,  enforcement of the law and re-examining penalties for perpetrators, and systematically educating young people about gender identity and sexual relations, gender-based violence will continue to flourish. It is always a possibility of course that no one will find out about it, because incidents will simply not be recorded…

In late June 2020, Robert Williams, an African-American resident of Detroit, was arrested at the entrance of his home in front of his two young daughters. No one could tell him why. At the police station, he was informed that he was considered a suspect in the 2018 robbery of a store, as his face was identified by in-store security surveillance footage. The identification was based on an old driver’s licence photo. After thirty hours in custody, Robert Williams was eventually released. The cynical confession of the Detroit police officers was disarming: “the computer probably made a mistake.” 

A similar incident occurred in June 2019 to Michael Oliver, also an African-American Detroit resident, who was arrested after the alleged identification of his face on a security-camera video. He was taken to trial, where he was eventually acquitted three months after his arrest. Similarly, in a test study of Amazon’s Rekognition software, the program incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress (!) as people who had previously been arrested for a crime. The misidentifications overwhelmingly involved blacks and Latinos. But do not assume that this only happens in the US. 

As discussed in the previous two parts of MIIR’s investigation on “The Digital Walls of Fortress Europe”, the EU, as part of a new architecture of border surveillance and mobility control, has in recent years introduced a number of systems to record and monitor citizens moving around the European space.

The EU is using different funding mechanisms for research and development, with an increasing emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, which can also use biometric data. Between 2007 and 2013 (but with projects running until 2020) the most relevant of these was the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), followed by Horizon 2020. These two programmes have funded EU security projects worth more than €1.3 billion. For the current period 2021-2027, Horizon Europe has a total budget of €95.5 billion, with a particular focus on ‘security’ issues. Technologies such as automated decision-making, biometrics, thermal cameras and drones are increasingly controlling migration and affecting millions of people on the move. Border management has become a profitable multi-billion-euro business in the EU and other parts of the world. According to an analysis by TNI (Border War Series), the annual growth of the border-security market is expected to be between 7.2 % and 8.6 %, reaching a total of USD 65-68 billion by 2025. 

The largest expansion is in the global Biometric Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) markets. The biometrics market itself is projected to double its turnover from $33 billion in 2019 to $65.3 billion by 2024. A significant part of the funding is directed towards enhancing the capabilities of EU-LISA (European Agency for the Operational Management of Large Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice) which is expected to play a key role in managing the interoperability of databases for mobility and security control. The activities of this supercomputer are funded by:

• a grant from the general budget of the EU. 
• a contribution from the member states related to the operation of the Schengen area and Eurodac related measures.
• direct financial contributions from member states. 

Chris Jones, Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Statewatch, has been following the money trail starting in Brussels for several years. He explains that “EU-research projects are usually run by consortia of private companies, public bodies and universities. Private companies receive the largest sums, more than public bodies.” A recent Statewatch study (Funds for Fortress Europe: spending by Frontex and EU-LISA, January 2022) highlights that around €1.5 billion was directed to private contractors for the development and strengthening of EU-LISA in the period 2014-2020, with the largest increase occurring after 2017 and the peak of the refugee crisis. 

The surveillance oligopoly

One of the most important contracts signed in 2020, worth €300 million, was between French companies Idemia and Sopra Steria for the implementation of a new Biometric Matching System (BMS). These companies often win new contracts as they have agreements for the maintenance of the EES, EURODAC, SIS II and VIS systems. Other companies that have been awarded high-value contracts for EU-LISA-related work are Atos, IBM, and Leonardo – for €140 million – and the consortium Atos, Accenture and Morpho (later Idemia) which in 2016 signed a contract worth €194 million.

Data collected by Statewatch also shows cooperation – usually through joint ventures – in the expansion of the EU-LISA system with companies of Greek interests, such as Unisystems SA (owned by the Quest Group of former President of the Association of Greek Industrialists Th. Fessa), which signed a €45 million contract in 2019. Similarly, European Dynamics SA (owned by Konstantinos Velentzas) participated in a €187 million contract awarded in 2020, and Luxembourg-based Intrasoft International SA (previously owned by Kokkalis interests) is participating with five other companies in a €187 million project in 2020. 

The new frontier of AI and the pressures on the EU

In April 2021, the European Commission published its long-awaited draft regulation on artificial intelligence (AI ACT). The consultation process is expected to take some time. This important piece of legislation exceeds 200 pages and which will be – among other things – a refinement of the data protection legislation (Directive 680/2016). There is expected to be considerable pressure exerted by companies and operators in the sector until the bill is submitted in its final form to the European Parliament.

MIIR has investigated the records of official meetings on AI and digital policy issues between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager (“A Europe Fit for the Digital Age”), Commissioner Thierry Breton (Internal Market) and their staffs between December 2019 and March 2022. It emerges that at least 14 agencies, private sector giants and consortia of companies related to the security and defence sector met with key representatives of the European Commission 71 times in 28 months to discuss issues related to digital policy and AI. Most meetings with the Commissioners were held by DIGITALEUROPE, an organisation representing 78 corporate members, including major defence and security companies such as Accenture, Airbus and Atos. Other consortia were also identified to be lobbying heavily, such as the European Round Table for Industries (ERT) which represents a number of defence and security companies such as Leonardo, Rolls-Royce and Airbus.

High-risk systems

The proposal for the European regulation (COM/2021/206 final) adopted in April 2021, gives a good overview of the AI systems and applications that are expected to be regulated, and the risks of their unregulated operation at Europe’s entry points. As stated: “[…] it is appropriate to classify as high-risk AI systems intended to be used by the competent public authorities responsible for tasks in the areas of immigration management, asylum and border control as polygraphs and similar tools or for detecting the emotional state of an individual; for assessing certain risks presented by natural persons entering the territory of a member state or applying for a visa; for assessing certain risks presented by natural persons entering the territory of a member state or applying for a visa; for assessing the risk of a person’s personal data […]”

The critical parameter

The scope of the field where ‘high-risk’ AI systems can be applied seems wide. Despite hopes that a new directive will regulate how they operate, there is one parameter that may remove this possibility. As revealed in an internal presentation by the European Commission’s internal review that took place in May and was brought to light by Statewatch, the new regulation, if passed, will come into force 24 months after it is signed and will not apply to all systems, as it is not expected to be retroactive to those on the market before the effective date.

Robo-dogs in action: Algorithms and nightmarish research projects

“There is a great effort by EU institutions and member states to increase the number of deportations. The EU has poured money and resources and these databases to essentially say ‘we want to help remove these people from European soil’,” Statewatch’s Chris Jones points out. Indeed, automation and the use of industry-pushed algorithmic tools are already playing an important role at Europe’s entry points, raising many questions about safeguarding the rights of refugees and migrants. It is not only the profiling that worries those who criticise these EU projects, but also the quality of the data on which this process is based. “It looks like a ‘black box’, where we don’t know exactly what’s inside,” says refugee law specialist and anthropologist Petra Molnar, who focuses on the risk of automation without a human factor in decision-making when it determines human lives.

Some of the major pilot systems funded in the past few years include the following:

• iBorderCtrl – “smart” lie detectors 

Combines facial matching and document authentication tools with AI technologies. It is a “lie detector”, tested in Hungary, Greece and Latvia, and involved the use of a “virtual border guard”, personalised for the gender, nationality and language of the traveller – a guard asking questions via a digital camera. The project was funded with €4.5 million from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, and has been heavily criticised as dangerous and pseudo-scientific (“Sci-fi surveillance: Europe’s secretive push into biometric technology”, The Guardian, 10 December 2020; “We Tested Europe’s New Lie Detector for Travelers – and Immediately Triggered a False Positive”, The Intercept, 26 July 2019).

It was piloted under simulated conditions in early July 2019 at the premises of TRAINOSE in a specially designed area of the Security Studies Centre in Athens. Before departure the traveller had to upload a photo of an ID or passport to a special application. They then answered questions posed by a virtual border guard. Special software recorded their words and facial movements, which might have escaped the attention of an ordinary eye, and in the end the software calculated – supposedly – the traveller’s degree of sincerity.

On 2 February 2021, the European Court of Justice ruled on a lawsuit brought by MEP and activist Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) against the privacy of this research project, which he called pseudo-scientific and Orwellian.

• Roborder (an autonomous swarm of heterogeneous robots for border surveillance) 

• Foldout 

The €8.1 million Foldout research project does not hide its aims: “in recent years irregular migration has increased dramatically and is no longer manageable with existing systems”. The main idea of the project, piloted in Bulgaria and being rolled out in Finland, Greece and French Guinea, is to place motion sensors on land sections of the border where terrain or vegetation makes it difficult to detect an irregular crossing. With any suspicious movement, human or vehicle, there will be the possibility of sending a drone to that point or activating ground cameras for additional monitoring. The consortium developing it is coordinated by the Austrian Institute of Technology (which has received €25 million from 37 European projects).

Among the organisations lobbying for these projects at the European level, we met EARTO, a consortium of research centres and project beneficiaries in various fields, including security. These included KEMEA in Greece, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (140 EU-funded research projects, including Roborder) and the Austrian Institute of Technology (Foldout). 

Many of the Horizon 2020 research projects (Roborder, iBorderCtrl, Foldout, Trespass, etc.) have been described by their own authors as still “immature” for widespread use. However, the overall shift in the European Union’s approach to the use of AI for mobility control and crime prevention can be seen in the ever-increasing funding of the European Security Fund. One such project is the supply of thousands of mobile devices by the Greek police that will allow citizens to be identified using facial recognition and fingerprinting software. The total cost of the project, undertaken by Intracom Telecom, exceeds €4 million and 75% comes from the European Security Fund. 

The Samos “experiment”

“Borders and immigration are the perfect laboratory for experiments. Opaque, high-risk conditions with low levels of accountability. Borders are becoming the perfect testing ground for new technologies that can later be used more extensively on different communities and populations. This is exactly what you see in Greece, right?”, asks lawyer Petra Molnar. The answer is in the affirmative, both for the north and the south of the country.

On the island of Samos on Greece’s south-eastern border with Turkey, at the new migrant camp which the Greek government is almost advertising, two special pilot systems called HYPERION and CENTAUR are being put into operation.

• HYPERION is an asylum management system for all the needs of the Reception and Identification Service. It processes biometric and biographical data of asylum seekers, as well as of the members of NGOs visiting the relevant structures and of the workers in these structures. It is planned to be the main tool for the operation of the Closed Reception Centres (CRCs) as it will be responsible for access control, monitoring of benefits per asylum seeker using an individual card (food, clothing supplies, etc.) and movements between the CRCs, and accommodation facilities. The project includes the creation of a mobile phone application that will provide personalised information to the user, to act as their electronic mailbox regarding their asylum application process, with the ability to provide personalised information.
• CENTAUR is a digital system for the management of electronic and physical security around and within the premises, using cameras and AI behavioural analytics algorithms. It includes centralised management from the Ministry of Digital Governance and services such as: signalling perimeter breach alarms using cameras (capable of thermometry, focus and rotation) and motion analysis algorithms; signalling of illegal behaviour alarms for individuals or groups of individuals in assembly areas inside the facility; and use of unmanned aircraft systems to assess incidents inside the facility without human intervention. 

“CENTAUR uses cameras that have a great ability to focus on specific individuals, cameras that can also take someone’s temperature. The most important thing is not that CENTAUR will use this image for security reasons, it is that behavioural analysis algorithms will also be used, without explaining exactly what it means,” says lawyer and member of Homo Digitalis, Kostas Kakavoulis. As he points out, “an algorithm learns to come to certain conclusions based on some data we have given it. Such an algorithm will be able to distinguish between the fact that person X may have increased aggressive behaviour, and may attack other asylum seekers or guards, or may want to escape from the accommodation facility illegally. Another use of behaviour analysis algorithms is lie analysis, which can judge whether our behaviour and our words reflect something that is true or not. This is mainly done through the analysis of biometric data, the data that we all produce through our movement in space, through our physical presence, through our physical appearance and also the way we move our hands, the way we blink, the way we walk, for example. All these may seem insignificant, but if someone can collect them over a long period of time and can correlate them with the data of many other people, they may be able to come to conclusions about us, which may surprise us, about how aggressive our behaviour can be, how much anxiety we have, how afraid we are, whether we are telling the truth or not.” In the current legislation, it is prohibited to process personal data without the possibility of human intervention. 

Lawyer Petra Molnar has recently been researching the effects of AI applications on the control of migration flows. She was in Samos at the opening of the new closed reception centre. “Multiple layers of barbed wire, cameras everywhere, fingerprint stations at the rotating gate, entry-exit points. Refugees see it as a prison complex. I will never forget that. On the eve of the opening I was at the old camp in Vathi, Samos. We talked to a young mother from Afghanistan. She was pushing her young daughter in a pram and hurriedly typed a message on her phone that said: ‘If we go there, we’ll go crazy’. And every time I look at the camps with these systems, I realise that it embodies that fear that people have when they’re going to be isolated, and surveillance technologies are used to further control their movements.” 

Médecins Sans Frontières described the new structure in Samos as a “dystopian nightmare”. They were not alone. “The CENTAUR system is framed by the use of highly intrusive technologies to protect privacy, personal data as well as other rights such as behavioural and motion analysis algorithms, drones and closed circuit surveillance cameras. There is a serious possibility that the installation of the YPERION and CENTAUR systems may violate the European Union legislation on the processing of personal data and the provisions of Law 4624/2019”, the NGO Homo Digitalis points out. The Hellenic Human Rights Association, HIAS Greece, Homo Digitalis and a Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London Dr Niovi Vavoula filed a request before the Greek Data Protection Authority (DPA) on 18 February 2022 for the exercise of investigative powers and the issuance of an Opinion on the supply and installation of the systems. On Wednesday 2 March 2022, the Authority commenced an investigation of the Department of Immigration and Asylum in relation to the two systems in question. 

The automation fetish

“The problem is that authorities, and politicians, are beginning to perceive advanced data analytics as factors in some kind of objective and unbiased knowledge about security issues, because they have this aura of mathematical precision. But artificial intelligence and machine learning can actually be very accurate in reproducing and magnifying the biases of the past. We should remember that poor quality data will only lead to bad automated, biased decisions,” says researcher George Glouftsios.

We wonder why we use robot dogs, sound cannons and lie detectors at our borders but do not use AI to weed out, for example, racist border guards. 

Flash forward. In 2054 the Washington DC police department has created a special pre-crime police team that arrests crime suspects before they even commit the crime. The predictions are made by three mutant human beings, who are in a state of permanent hypnosis and are able to see the future, including the potential criminal, before he or she even goes through with the act. It is a stretch – for the moment – to claim that we are approaching the fantasy of Philip Dick in Minority Report.

But what is not far off is the existence of various systems of behavioural analysis including lie detectors, facial and emotional recognition software, with automated decision-making on the horizon. All this – in a context of militarisation of the EU’s external borders, in a context of treating people on the move as a potential threat – risks creating a dangerous human laboratory, a high-risk experiment around fundamental human rights. 

Check out: Part 1 – The ecosystem of European biometric monitoring and surveillance data

Check out: Part 2 – Trapped in a digital surveillance system

*This article has been produced within the Panelfit project, supported by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission (grant agreement n. 788039). The Commission did not take part in the production of the article and is not responsible for its content. The article is part of the independent journalistic production of EDJNet

At the Greek Consulate in Istanbul, one morning in 2016, Erkan, a Turkish citizen of Kurdish origin, crosses the threshold of the building to address the Greek authorities. He was seeking a visa to enter Greece in order to flee Turkey at a time when the Erdogan regime was stepping up persecution, particularly against the leadership and members of the opposition HDP party and its Kurdish supporters. The Greek consular authority, however, rejected the visa request and Erkan was forced to remain in Turkey.

Οrestiada Evros, 4 years later. Erkan was arrested at the Greek-Turkish border as he attempted to enter Greek territory and was taken to court. The court sentenced him to 4 years in prison without suspension and a 10,000 euro fine on charges of re-entering the country. But Erkan had not re-entered Greece.

What had happened? In front of Greek judges, Erkan sought asylum from Greece for persecution by the Erdogan regime, but was told that his name was on the National List of Unwanted Aliens (EKANA) and the Schengen Information System (SIS II, the largest information exchange system between Schengen countries), with a note that he had been banned from entering the country for 7 years. Because of his inclusion on these lists, he was taken first to Komotini prison and then to Corfu prison.

“We were trying to find out what had really happened” recounts Erkan’s lawyer and Human Rights 360 attorney, Eugenia Kouniaki. “My client had never entered Greece before and was suddenly convicted of re-entering the country. Initially, I contacted the police authorities, the Director of the Asylum Service in Athens, where he replied that my client had been included in the EKANA and SIS II because his visa had been rejected by the Consulate in Istanbul.”

 The truth was quite simply to be found in the operation of the Single European Visa Information System (VISA-VIS) and SIS II. The Greek consulate that processed Erkan’s application entered the visa refusal in the VIS system and in SIS II at the same time. From then on, this record was enough to get him on his way to prison, even if he sought international protection.

“Even when I asked for his removal from the undesirable list and SIS II, as Erkan was an asylum seeker, the Greek police refused,” Kouniaki describes. “Apart from the fact that my client did not know that he was on the list, when we tried to find out why his visa was refused in 2016, we received the vague answer ‘for falsifying some documents’. When we attempted to find out what documents were claimed to have been falsified, we could not check what they were. Fortunately, in the appeal that we filed for a delay in implementing the sentence, the judges accepted our arguments, and after a year he was released from prison.”

However, after all this unfair treatment and imprisonment, he preferred to leave the country “because he believed that he would never find justice,” Kouniaki concludes.

Burning fingers to avoid identification in EURODAC

Erkan’s story may sound outrageous, but unfortunately it is not the only one linked to the consequences of surveillance technologies and biometric data systems for migrants. In the report “Technological Testing Grounds: migration management experiments and reflections from the ground up” (EDRi, Refugee Law Lab, November 2020), author Petra Molnar, a lawyer and member of EDRi (European Digital Rights), has collected a multitude of interviews with asylum seekers in Brussels who came into contact with mobility control systems during their journey to safety in Europe.

Caleb, a married man in his 30s, describes his experience of the asylum process by saying he felt “like a piece of meat with no life, just fingerprints and iris scans”. Another migrant, Esche, describes her encounter with drones in the Mediterranean and the English Channel with a devastating quote the moment she saw them in the sky: “now we have flying computers instead of more asylum”.

The most unpleasant story is told by Negassi, a 20-year-old from Ethiopia: ‘I am tired and I want to go to England’ he says after being stranded in Brussels for nearly two years, undocumented, and earlier the same in Nuremberg for 5 years. But this is not his first time in Belgium, as he was deported to Germany before when he was arrested in a park in Brussels, where he was sleeping rough. When his biometric data was taken by the Belgian police, his fingerprints showed a hit on the EURODAC system, which stores and identifies the fingerprints of asylum seekers, identifying him as a first-time asylum seeker in Germany. So they sent him back because of Dublin II, which stipulates that the first host country has to process the claim.

Negassi acknowledges that the process of collecting biometric data is invasive to the body, but asks: “How can I refuse when the police handcuff me, take me to the station and force me to give my fingerprints?” he tells Molnar. He has friends who have gone so far as to burn their fingers to alter their fingerprints and avoid identification. “However, that doesn’t solve the problem” for Negassi, as no identification usually means a longer detention period.

“There is a very important aspect that is not discussed enough in the public debate,” Petra Molnar tells us, “and it concerns the fact that these surveillance technologies cause trauma to people who are not even familiar with the technology. The migrants I spoke to all had a strong belief within them that they were experiencing racist and discriminatory treatment through their contact with these systems.”

This is why it is even more important, he continues, “in terms of the rampant use of these technologies, that there is accountability, oversight and governance. We need to focus on what kind of governance structures need to be developed to ensure that these technologies, which are a human-rights risk, do not cause trauma to people.”

The accountability part, however, does not seem to be enhanced by the way these systems are developed. The involvement of private companies in the security and defence industries further complicates matters. “There is a very problematic relationship of private companies and state institutions working together under the guise that states themselves cannot develop these technologies in-house”, points out Molnar. “So huge public resources are directed to big companies to develop them. But also from a legal point of view, it creates the problem of what some call ‘responsibility laundering’ when something goes wrong. In these cases, as we have seen, the state says ‘it is not our problem because we did not develop this technology’. And the private company for its part retorts that ‘the state management of the tools is to blame’.”

But public budgets for the industrial complex of migration management and border control are substantial, Molnar points out. “Of all that money in such a problematic technology that inflicts trauma, imagine if it went to education, legal services, housing. Why don’t states, instead of pouring so much money into surveillance technologies, think about how to use it for social inclusion?”

The European Border Surveillance system (Eurosur) and the money for drones

Perhaps the most interesting system for migration issues is Eurosur, which produces maps of both territorial/land and maritime borders. It is operated by Frontex and allows for the exchange of maps between states regarding border controls at sea. “The development of Eurosur was launched in 2007, but it reaches the European Parliament for the first time at the end of 2012, after hundreds of millions have been spent and its design has been completed, effectively presenting the institution with a fait accompli. Due to the lack of transparency, the research in the relevant directorates of the European Commission is largely captured by the priorities of the security-industry complex”, journalist Apostolis Fotiadis reported in his book “Border Merchants”.

When it was first developed it was promoted as a “humanitarian technology”, a system that would allow the authorities of each member state to conduct search and rescue operations. The idea was that “we use maps, we get information from satellites and also from drones, to perceive migratory flows, for example from Africa to Europe, so that we can rescue people at sea”. The problem is that Eurosur creates so-called pre-frontier pictures. These are maps that focus on the area before the border, before a ship arrives at the maritime border, for example Greece. “Mainly they do it to organise pull-back operations, because for example the Italian authorities can share data with the Libyan authorities so that the Libyan authorities can take back the migrants. They know that push-backs are not allowed, so the solution is pull-backs. That’s why Libya is funded,” explains Georgios Glouftios, a lecturer at the University of Trento, to MIIR.

For the creation of the pre-frontier maps, Frontex also cooperates with the European Union Satellite Centre (EU SatCen), which provides it with satellite imagery, aerial photographs and other related services. The Eurosur database also records incidents occurring at the EU maritime borders, although member states have not been obliged until now to upload data from incidents at border checkpoints in a systematic and organised manner (this changed with an implementing regulation in April 2021). Which means that there is no complete and methodical recording of incidents, blurring the overall picture of incidents at the external borders. A fact that is also admitted by the European Commission in the Eurosur evaluation report (September 2018).

Frontex’s second report in 2018 on the operation of Eurosur recorded over 184,000 incidents in the period from December 2013 to the beginning of 2018, with the vast majority (147,827) relating to migratory flows.

In February 2022, the French government announced that it would install additional cameras along the Channel coast to help monitor migrants hoping to cross the stretch of water to the UK. The cameras are being paid for by the British government. In December 2021, the Italian navy delivered a new shipment of containers with surveillance equipment to Libya to monitor migration in the Mediterranean (source: Altreconomia research magazine, February 2021 issue). Additional “trap cameras” for cars and people have also been placed at or near the border between Italy and Slovenia along the so-called Balkan route.

Eyes in the sky

Frontex confirms that it uses “a set of services falling under Eurosur, the information exchange framework designed to improve the management of Europe’s external borders” (source: infomigrants.net, “Digital borders: EU increases use of technology to monitor migration”, 18.2.2022). It states that most of this monitoring is carried out “by aerial surveillance by manned and unmanned aircraft, with satellite imagery devices and collection of vessel positions through positioning systems”.

According to a recent in-depth survey (“Funds for Fortress Europe: spending by Frontex and EU-LISA”, January 2022) by the non-profit organisation Statewatch, Frontex spends most of its annual budget on maritime and aerial surveillance, alongside deportations (chartered and scheduled flights for the return of migrants). According to data analysis carried out by Statewatch, between 2014-2020 Frontex together with the European agency EU-LISA (which oversees large-scale mobility-control information systems) spent a combined €1.9 billion on contracts with private IT companies and the security and defence industry. Of this money about half a billion (€434 million) was managed by Frontex with more than €100 million going to contracts with private companies related to air surveillance. This included a €50 million contract with the Airbus consortium – one of the leading trans-European companies in the aerospace and defence industry – and the Israeli company Elbit, which supplies 85% of the Israeli army’s drones.

In the same period, Frontex seems to have had a profitable relationship with three other air surveillance service providers: the Canadian CAE Aviation, the British Diamond-Executive Aviation (DEA) and the Dutch EASP Air. As a consortium they won contracts worth a total of €57 million (not counting the contracts they have signed alone for other security and control services to Frontex).

The same trend continued in 2021 with €84 million – i.e. one sixth of Frontex’s annual budget – going to air surveillance services.

In the deportation process, Frontex has worked with the Polish eTravel SA on €50 million contracts to provide travel services (booking and ticketing services) for the scheduled return flights. It has also worked with the British multinational Air Charter Service Limited and the Norwegian AS Aircontact in flight chartering for the same purpose.

London-based Privacy International in July 2021 published its findings on how an increasing number of companies are “developing satellites capable of tracking and selling their data to border agencies”. The organisation concluded that while “such surveillance can save lives, it can also facilitate pullbacks or be used to persecute asylum seekers”.

The use of all these surveillance technologies also has a deeper consequence, underscores Antonella Napolitano, network coordinator of Privacy International. “On the one hand, it contributes to the criminalization of the migrant’s person, and at the same time it turns him into a data hub, from the beginning of the journey from the country of origin to the evaluation of biometric data in the EU. The aim is to fully record his movement and track him until the next steps within the European area. Indeed, if he is found trapped because of a wrong recording or decision within these systems where his data is stored, this error follows him for the rest of his life.”

This notion is not unconnected to the risk of extending surveillance to the whole range of travel, whether for tourism or work. Moreover, Napolitano points out, “the very interoperability of the systems is a good example of how a system developed to monitor migratory movements can then be extended to everyone, as these systems are progressively extended to all travellers entering the European area, but also to EU citizens moving within the EU”. 

“Being potentially considered a ‘criminal by default’, a concept reflected in the management of surveillance technologies, cannot leave anyone indifferent,” Napolitano concludes.  

Passenger Name Record: the monitoring of intra-EU movements

The Passenger Name Record (PNR) concerns the recording of all data of passengers moving within European territory, regardless of whether they come from a third country. What does this system collect?  Name, nationality, when we travelled, where from, where to, our email, our address. Apart from that, one can find out our travelling companions, possibly some data related to our stay such as hotel reservations, whether we travelled for business or personal reasons. It can probably even find out in an extreme case our religion, as the system even records the meal we ate during our flight. This meal may contain ‘interesting’ facts about us, e.g. if we eat kosher we are Jewish, if we don’t eat pork it means we are Muslim. It may also reveal if someone has allergies.

The PNR is accessible to the police authorities of each country. “And this is where the problems start. There is a European directive on how personal data can be processed through the PNR system. This European legislation must be transposed into national law in each country. The problem is that we have some failures in the transposition of this directive in different countries, such as Greece,” says lawyer Kostas Kakavoulis, a member of Homo Digitalis, to MIIR. As he explains, “the European directive says that each member state shall establish or designate an authority which is responsible for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of serious terrorist offences. So we are talking about an authority that is either established from the outset or exists and is given this competence. In Greece, the legislature has given this competence to a department within the Directorate of Information Management and Analysis of the Greek Police. So we are not talking about an authority but a directorate of the Greek police. It is absurd for the body which holds the data, the police, to ask for access to this data from a department within the police. If it is subject to hierarchical control or if there are pressures in general, it is rather doubtful that a department of the Greek police will refuse to provide other departments of the Greek police with data that they need, even if it were necessary to do so. In France this is not the case, as a special independent authority has been set up for PNR data. In Greece any police force can have uncontrolled access to PNR data anywhere, anytime. There is no record anywhere of who requested which data, when and for what purpose. And there is no classified access policy. You only need to be a member of the police force to access this data.”

In Greece, the organisation Homo Digitalis (member of EDRi), in an open letter to the parliament, underlines that “the data in question can reveal the pattern of a person’s movements, such as the time of travel, the place of departure and arrival, his/her email and address, as well as a person’s travelling companions, but possibly even related hotel reservation data, etc., thus revealing information on business or personal travel and even the person’s social circle, such as friends or companions”.

The organisation notes that in the draft law submitted in 2018 in Greece there was:

• lack of a system for recording access to PNR data
• lack of prior judicial control over the provision of PNR data to pre-trial and other authorities
• the retention period of PNR data is not limited to the strictly necessary period

Four years later, the same shortcomings remain.

The organisation stressed that PNR data of minors transferred should be described clearly and accurately, and that any data transferred should not reveal either religious beliefs or information about the passenger’s health.

In part one of MIIR’s investigation: The ecosystem of European biometric monitoring and surveillance data

In part three of MIIR’s investigation: the features of artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems in the new mobility-screening regime, and the private contractors building and marketing them in the EU.

*This article has been produced within the Panelfit project, supported by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Commission (grant agreement n. 788039). The Commission did not take part in the production of the article and is not responsible for its content. The article is part of the independent journalistic production of EDJNet

Photo: Shutterstock/sakhorn

Research-text: Ioanna Louloudi, Nikos Morfonios (MIIR)  

Research and graph development: Thanasis Trombukis (iMEdD Lab)*.

MIIR and iMEdD research on Greek prisons during the pandemic period in the context of an analysis of data from 32 countries carried out simultaneously by 12 European media led by Deutsche Welle in the framework of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet).

“For the last 3 weeks the prison has been in a state of turmoil, wards are being closed from one moment to the next, prisoners are being quarantined out of nowhere. The prison administration, unable to provide basic protection measures against Covid-19 and unable to manage the sudden increase in cases, has decided to impose a permanent confinement regime on us beyond what we are already experiencing.” 

This is the beginning of the open letter sent on 27 March 2022 by prisoners of the Women’s Prison of Korydallos, recounting the conditions in the prison while in Greece, as in most of the world, the fifth wave of the pandemic continues. The image conveyed from inside the prison is not a long way from the image conveyed by Greek prisoners at the beginning of the 4th wave. At that time, for example, there were more than 40 cases among inmates of the Diavata prison in Thessaloniki (November 2021). Similarly, at the end of the 4th wave, 20 prisoners and 7 prison officers tested positive and 50 were quarantined in the Nea Alikarnassos prison (February 2022).

The management of the pandemic in Europe’s prisons was the subject of a major survey which analysed data from 32 countries. It was conducted simultaneously by 12 European media led by Deutsche Welle as part of the European Data Journalism Network (EDJNet). MIIR (Mediterranean Institute for Investigative Reporting) and iMEdD (incubator for Media Education and Development) were commissioned to collect and process the specific data concerning Greece.

In the first part of the research, published on 12 March, we examined the spread of the virus in Greek and European prisons since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, and came to some striking conclusions on prison conditions. For example, Greece appears in 7th place on the list of the most overcrowded prisons in Europe, while the minimum living space of 4 sqm per prisoner under international conventions is violated in 25 out of 34 Greek prisons. This makes prisoners even more exposed to the virus than they are already.

Our comparative analysis of data revealed that during the pandemic, the occupancy rate of Greek prisons not only did not decrease, but actually increased, with the result that Greece was among the countries that had high spread of the virus in prisons compared to the general population. Specifically, by 2 July 2021, 16 months after the start of the pandemic, it is estimated that 7.9% of prisoners overall had contracted Covid-19, while 4.1% of the general population in Greece was infected with the virus. Our conclusions are confirmed by the Council of Europe’s annual report published on 5 April, which states that on 31 January 2021 Greece hosted 106.1 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants – up 3.6% compared to 2020. The equivalent figure in Council of Europe member states was 101.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, down 2.3% compared to 2020 (104.3). According to the report, in Europe as a whole, prison occupancy fell by 5.3% compared to a year earlier (from 90.2 to 85.4 prisoners per 100 available places). Greece was among the countries reporting overcrowding (111.4 prisoners per 100 places), behind Romania (119.3 prisoners per 100 places) but ahead of Cyprus (110.5), Belgium (108.4), Turkey (108.3) and Italy (105.5). Greece also has a very high prisoner-to-staff ratio (2.8 prisoners for every staff member), while the European average is 1.4. 

The publication of the first part of the survey was followed on 21 March by a question to the European Commission from Left Group MEP Konstantinos Arvanitis, asking whether “it is acceptable to transform Greek prisons into overcrowding centres, given that Greece is one of the few European countries that refused to proceed with the measure of decongestion, which is a demonstrably effective strategy for dealing with the pandemic, and despite the dramatic appeals of the United Nations”, and whether the Commission “considers that the worsening of the overcrowding conditions, resulting inter alia from the drastic reduction in the transfer of prisoners, is compatible with due respect for the principles of necessity and proportionality and with the fundamental human rights of prisoners”. The reply is currently pending.

A few days earlier, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, at its recent meeting on the enforcement of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights by member states, had expressed its concern about overcrowding in Greek prisons, stressing that this is a problem that has not been effectively addressed and has been outstanding “for more than ten years”. The committee made particular reference to the need to decongest the prisons of Ioannina, Korydallos and Thessaloniki, and called on the Greek government to provide a specific timetable for addressing the issue.

With the 5th wave of the pandemic just around the corner, we examined in the second part of the survey what happened in Greek prisons before and during the 4th wave, i.e. the period from 1 July 2021 to 18 February 2022, two dates for which we have detailed data for each prison.

The data shows that 2671 prisoners were diagnosed with coronavirus during this period, with the prevalence in prisons being 1.4 times higher compared to the general population. Specifically, 870 cases had been recorded by 1 July, while by 18 February 2022, 3541 cases had been recorded. Given that the average total number of prisoners in this eight-month period was 11037, it is estimated that 24% of prison inmates in that period were diagnosed with Covid-19, compared to 17% in the general population.

The highest prevalences, with more than 500 cases per thousand prisoners, were recorded in the Nafplio, Corinth, Kos and Amfissa detention centres. During this period the Nafplio prison held more than 400 prisoners, while its capacity was 273. 

Comparison with the general population

During this period, a higher rate of cases in prisons compared to the general population was recorded in 15 of the 22 Greek regions we examined.

Notable are Fokida and Argolida, where the incidence within prisons was 4.7 and 4.1 times higher compared to the general population, while in Korinthos it was 3.9 times higher. Overall in the 22 regions during the eight months under review there were 205.5 cases per 1000 inhabitants, while in prisons there were 242 cases per 1000 prisoners.

Furthermore, the prevalence within prisons during the 4th wave was even higher compared to the previous period. In the period from 1 March 2020 to 1 July 2021, in 13 regions of Greece the incidence within prisons was higher compared to the general population and in 9 regions it was lower. According to available data, by November 2020, 0.9% of prisoners had tested positive for the coronavirus, compared to 0.4% of the general population. By February 2021, 3.8% of prisoners had tested positive, compared to 1.6% of the general population. In July 2021 the rates were 7.9% and 4% respectively. In November 2021, the prevalence in prisons was still more than double (16.8% vs. 7.2%). By February 2022, a period covering the fourth wave of the pandemic, 32.6% of prisoners had been diagnosed with coronavirus compared to 21.2% of the general population. 

It is interesting to compare the rate of increase in cases inside and outside prisons during the period from November 2021 to February 2022: cases outside prisons increased by 193.7%, while cases inside prisons increased by only 88.8%. For prisons, however, this did not mean a reduction in the problem. By February 2022 a higher proportion of prisoners had already contracted coronavirus compared to the general population, which may be attributed to inadequate containment measures. 

Based on our research and the response we received to a query to the General Secretariat for Anticrime Policy, among the measures taken since the beginning of the pandemic were the suspension of prison visits during outbreak periods and a halving of them during the rest of the time; the curtailment of leave (educational, regular, etc.) for prisoners; a reduction of employment and “day jobs”; restrictions within prison shops; and the creation of an electronic visit register.

However, as pointed out in the first part of the survey, no overall plan was implemented to decongest the prisons (reduction of the number of inmates, reduction of sentences, targeted transfers). Moreover, there continued to be serious shortages of health staff and protective equipment, as well as a manifest sloppiness in the management of cases and care of the sick. Indicative is the testimony of an inmate of Larissa prison, Vangelis Stathopoulos, who himself contracted coronavirus in December 2020: “So anyone who gets sick is put in a ward for 14 days with all the other Covid patients, which means that if someone has a heavy viral load they will automatically spread it to everyone else and they can all get very sick. So the procedure is that we put all the sick people together and whatever happens will happen.” 

This picture is not far from the one conveyed by the inmates of the Women’s Prison of Korydallos, while similar complaints have been made by prisoners of the Domokos Detention Centre. There, only 4 cases had been detected by 2 July 2021, while in the eight months that followed, until 18 February, the cases reached 152. That number is estimated to have since increased: in March alone at least 18 more prisoners reportedly tested positive for coronavirus. 

Korydallos prison – Credit: Prisoners’ Solidarity Network

Delay in vaccinations

A crucial factor in the increased spread of Covid-19 during the 4th wave of the pandemic appears to have been the delay in the start of the vaccination programme in Greek prisons. This only began on 1 July 2021, several months after the start for the general population, despite the fact that prisoners are a vulnerable population living in closed, and therefore dangerous, conditions.

According to the minutes of the Special Standing Committee on the Penitentiary System and other Inmate Confinement Facilities of 10 June 2021, only 388 inmates (out of a total of 11,031, 3.5%) and 504 employees had completed vaccination. During the same period, only 22 prisoners had received the first dose. That is a total of 410 inmates vaccinated, the vast majority of them with the J&J single-shot vaccine. By 18 November 2021 – i.e. at the beginning of the 4th wave – only 59% of prisoners had been vaccinated (6,600 prisoners).

“Vaccinating prisoners should be a top priority for every state because their living conditions enhance disease transmission. Prisoners are under the responsibility of the state, they are not able to protect themselves and their health, or to take the measures they themselves consider necessary to prevent the risks posed by the pandemic”, stresses Iphigenia Kamtsidou, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and member of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe (CPT). “It is for this reason that a democratic state should first and foremost take care of the health and lives of the people under its responsibility.” 

Can Greece change direction?

On 9 March 2022, the Greek judge of the European Court of Human Rights, Ioannis Ktistakis, presented to the parliamentary committee responsible for monitoring ECHR judgments the data on Greek convictions in Strasbourg, as well as the pending individual appeals from Greece. All paint a dark picture of the living conditions in Greek prisons. According to Ktistakis, of the total of 2,214 individual appeals pending against Greece (representing more than 3% of the total of 70,150 pending appeals from 47 states), 1,782, or 81%, concern exclusively the conditions of detention in the country’s prisons. “What is particularly worrying in the case of Greece is its inability to put things right, to comply in a timely and substantial manner with the Strasbourg judgments,” the ECHR judge told parliament.

March marked two years since the emergence of the coronavirus in our country and no one knows how long the pandemic will remain in our lives. “Covid-19 should be a wake-up call to invest in better prison conditions and reduce the use of incarceration,” says Catherine Heard, director of the World Prison Research Programme. In the case of the management of the pandemic in Greek prisons and during the 4th wave of the pandemic, however, the lesson does not seem to have been learned yet.

*Supplementary report by Kelly Kiki (iMEdD Lab)

The project is a collaboration within the European Data Journalism Network

Project leader: Deutsche Welle

Partners: Alternatives Economiques, Civio, El Confidencial, EURologus, Il Sole24Ore, iMEdD, MIIR, OBC Transeuropa, Openpolis, Pod črto, VoxEurop