Announcement of the academics' Union

UNION OF TEACHING AND SCIENTIFIC PERSONNEL IN ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI

ANNOUNCEMENT

The Union of Teaching and Scientific Personnel of AUTH, given the unjustifiable massive and brutal arrests of dozens of students of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, that had been peacefully demonstrating against the legislation reforms in the Highest Education Level, taking part in the education demonstration of Thursday 8-3-2007 in Athens following their student unions' decisions,

• expresses the solidarity of the academic professors of our University towards their struggling students and especially towards the arrestees, a lot of whom are first year pre-graduate students,
• protests strongly against the provocative and bloody suppression of the struggles of the student and the university-wide movement as a choice for applying the governmental policy for the Higher Education,
• expresses their firm opposition to the infringement of the constitutional and juridical rights of the arrestees, who have been deprived from having a contact with their lawyers and their family for more than 24 hours.
• strictly denounces the plans and the tactics for taking advantage of the so-called masqueteers by the security forces, who aim to defame and degrade the University and Student movement in the social conscience.
• firmly protests against the penalisation of the democratic and critical right of every citizen to freely demonstrate their opposition to the governmental choices; and against the extremely having charges of "anti-terrorist" kind, for "constituting a gang", which have been falsified by every recent witness and record.

The Union believes that the arrested students, whom we, professors, know in person in the classrooms and the amphitheatres, have nothing to do with the accusations, as neither do they wear any masks, or are "gangsters" by taking part in the democratic procedures of their student unions.

ESDEP comittee
(signatures)
Eleftheria Karnavou (president) / Yannis Krestenitis (secretary)

Thessaloniki 10-3-2007