Systematic arrests of trans women in Greece?

First 25 trans women were arrested in August, 2012. Since then, arrests continued in Greece.

 

Greek police have started to systematically arrest transgender women in Athens and Thessaloniki. The police continued to make numerous arrests in the last few weeks, and detained a lawyer defending the women.

 

Arrests started in August 2012, when the police detained 25 transgender women without any explanation. The women were forced to undergo an HIV test and were later released.

 

In recent weeks, the police in Thessaloniki operated sweeping arrests, often with policemen behaving offensively, under the pretext of ID verification and identifying the women as sex workers. Courts have cleared all arrested women of any charges. In the night of 4 June, the police also unlawfully detained the women’s lawyer, Electra Koutra, who was defending a transgender woman at the police station.

 

Sophie in’t Veld MEP and Raül Romeva i Rueda MEP, both Vice-President of the LGBT Intergroup at the European Parliament, have expressed their concerns over the systematic attacks on trans women in Greece. In’t Veld commented: “This is exactly why the European Union needs to include homophobic and transphobic hate speech and hate crime in its review of EU hate speech laws.”