Wednesday, 2nd of Μarch
13:00 Press Conference
The conference is available on our YouTube page
here
English translation available
In the late hours of 8 September 2020, large fires broke out at the migrant camp of Moria, on the frontier island of Lesvos, Greece, displacing thousands of people and reducing to ashes what had until then been the epicentre of the EU’s carceral archipelago. Only a few days after the fire, the police arrested six young asylum seekers (known as ‘the Moria 6’), five of them minors, and accused them of arson. The ‘Moria 6’ were convicted in two separate trials which were widely heralded as a ‘parody of justice’, with five of the 6 being convicted on the testimony of a single witness, who never appeared in court.
In the context of the upcoming appeal trial in Lesvos, on 6 March, FA/Forensis were commissioned by the lawyers representing four of the defendants to reconstruct the fire and cross-examine the key witness statement. Drawing from hours of footage from that night, our investigation, which will be launched in the press conference, reveals severe inconsistencies in the witness testimony and casts further doubt over the evidence upon which the judgement of the young asylum seekers was based. The investigation also situates the last fire within the overcrowded camp’s history of hundreds of outbreaks, demonstrating that it constitutes instead a foreseeable result of the precarious and unsafe living conditions manufactured and maintained for years by EU and Greek authorities.
In this press conference we’ll hear from the FA/Forensis researchers who led this investigation, we will discuss the upcoming trial with the legal team representing the defendants, and we will learn about ‘Moria Trial Watch’, a new observatory which will publish a live feed of the proceedings, an initiative by Solomon and omniatv, supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – Οffice in Greece and State of Concept Athens:
Effie Doussi, Vicky Aggelidou, Natassa Ntailiani, Vasilis Psomos, lawyers representing the defendants
Dimitra Andritsou, Stefanos Levidis, Forensic Architecture/Forensis
Stavros Malichudis, Solomon
The press conference will be held in Greek.
For english speakers please contact FA/Forensis
The investigation will be available for viewing at State of Concept Athens, until the 1st of April at institutional opening hours, as part of the program “Truth will not take Care of itself”.
The research will operate as a point of reference for the whole program. Departing from themes that relate to what became known as the refugee crisis and the way surveillance technology and necropolitical tech is related to it, scholars, activists, artists and theorists are invited to think together how to take care of truth in a program that will unfold in the coming months. State of Concept with Forensic Architecture/Forensis and Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung office in Greece, will be working with affected communities, local activists, legal and investigative teams.
The program is looking into the way two crises unfolding in tandem these last years are presented in the mainstream: the climate and what became known as the refugee crisis. We will be investigating how they are both affected by new technologies of surveillance, developed within and outside of Europe, especially in developing economies like Greece.
Forensic Architecture is an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of
London. We undertake advanced spatial and media analysis for international prosecutors,
human rights groups and NGOs. Our research is presented in political and legal forums, truth
commissions, courts, and human rights reports, as well as in exhibitions and public events.
Forensis is FA’s sister organisation, founded in Berlin in 2021 to carry the agency’s techniques
into new contexts.
www.counter-investigations.org
www.forensic-architecture.org