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Four foreign women - rape victims of the same attacker in Greece are becoming victims of the justice system, because of the systematic continuance of the trials against him for seven years now.

According to them, the trials have been delayed mostly at the request of the attacker’s defender Zoe Konstandopoulou who is an outspoken member of SYRIZA in the Greek Parliament at present.

Ta Nea newspaper published the stories of two of the victims who have been waiting in vain for justice for years. One of them is Australian Dana Marie Saint, who was raped in the summer of 2005. There is no court decision on her case yet because of the constant continuances.

In the majority of cases, however, they are not due to lawyers or judges’ strikes but to the procedural obstacles posed by the defender of the attacker. The interesting thing here is that even the party to which she belongs criticizes her tactics.

Sisi Vouvou, a member of the Network for Women and of the Central Political Committee of SYRIZA says on this occasion, "I am surprised if there is a code of ethics for lawyers and whether it has been applied at all".

Within the context of the same trial, the attacker with initials E.A. is charged with raping Canadian journalist Natalie Cardiff and another Australian woman. At the same time, he has filed a claim at the Supreme Court for reconsideration of the judgement of a court of second instance, which sentences him to five years in jail and two years of infamy for the rape of a third woman - a citizen of a country in northern Europe. His claim is expected to be considered in a few days.

From 2006 to date, the rape trials of Dana, Natalie, the other Australian woman and the woman from northern Europe have been delayed twice due to the absence of the victims and the witnesses, three times because of strikes of lawyers and judges and six times on the part of the accused and his defence. In addition, the hearing of the claim of the defendant at the Supreme Court has been suspended more than six times as Zoe Konstandopoulou had to attend other trials, twice after applying for an exception and once because she was sick.

Meanwhile, Zoe Konstandopoulou has been objecting various issues all the time: falsification of the record of the case, the presence of illegal composition of the court and invalid procedures and she requested a sound recording of the proceedings as well. She also filed six other objections, because she was not given the floor or she was deprived of the right to speak but all of them were rejected.

"It is very difficult to explain what it feels like to be in a state of constant expectation and hope that the case will end this time. What scares me is the thought that this man is free and he is probably doing the same things. I believe that there is no way for the Greek justice system to stop this. And the longer it takes to consider the case, the stronger the feeling of the defendant that he will probably not be punished for such actions," the woman wrote in a letter to the newspaper.

"The Greek legal system seems to have no respect for the victims of sexual violence and for the protection of justice in general. On the other hand, I am not surprised, especially after what I have seen recently in Greece or after my observations of how the system acted immediately after the attack on me", said Natalie Cardiff, the Canadian woman whose trial is being heard along with that of Dana.

"I am not very familiar with the legal system in my country but I know that when someone is called to participate in a trial as a witness, the institutions treat him with much more respect. I blame the Greek legal system that allows the case to be postponed", says the journalist.

"Nothing like that could happen in Australia. In my country, I worked in prisons and with people sentenced for sex crimes. I can definitely say that such a delay would not be accepted regardless of the social status of the accused. The wealth and power of a person could influence the decision, but not the progress of the trial", said Australian Dana Marie Saint.

SYRIZA, however, sees behind this, and other publications that criticize Zoe Konstandopoulou, attempts to cut off the party's efforts to reveal the truth in relation to the parliamentary investigation of the "Lagarde List" case. The defender is involved in the investigation committee as a lawyer. Many media, colleagues of hers and ordinary citizens mock her pathos and approach in interrogating the witnesses in the case, who have already become notorious for their severity and almost theatrical dramatic effects.