Minos Kokkinakis
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Minos Kokkinakis (25 January 1909 Sitia Crete - 28 January 1999 Sitia) was a Greek Jehovah's Witness who campaigned to overturn Greece's ban on proselytism, then an offence under Greek law.
A shopkeeper by trade, Kokkinakis became a Witness in his twenties. In 1938 he was the first Witness in Greece to be arrested for violating the law against proselytism which had just been enacted under pressure from the Greek Orthodox Church by the government of dictator Ioannis Metaxas. In all he would be arrested more than sixty times, tried 18 times and spend a combined total of six and a half years in prison.
His case became a cause celebre when, in May 1993, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled his right to religious freedom had been violated and awarded him damages of three and a half million drachmas. "The fifty years of persecution was worth going through for this historic moment," Kokkinakis said.
The landmark judgement, known as Kokkinakis v. Greece, was frequently cited in similar cases of proselytism in Greece, leading to acquittals not just of Witnesses but Pentecostal Christians--even a Buddhist.
After his 1938 arrest, further short sentences followed in 1939 and 1940. During World War II, Kokkinakis was incarcerated in the military prison in Athens for more than 18 months. He was again sentenced in 1947 and 1949, when he was exiled to the notorious prison island of Makronisos, where torture was widespread. He was among 40 Witnesses in a prison housing 14,000.
After surviving the hardships of Makronisos, Kokkinakis was arrested ten more times in the 1950s and 1960s for proselytism, one of hundreds of Witnesses to be imprisoned on such charges.
The case that was eventually ruled on by the European Court in 1993 dated back to March 1986, when Kokkinakis and his wife Elissavet visited a home in Sitia on Crete, where they apparently tried to convert a woman whose husband was the cantor at a local Orthodox church. He informed the police, who arrested the couple. They were charged with proselytism and sentenced in the criminal court of Lasithi to four months' imprisonment. The court declared the defendants had intruded "on the religious beliefs of Orthodox Christians . . . by taking advantage of their inexperience, their low intellect and their naivety."
The Crete Court of Appeal later acquitted Elissavet but upheld her husband's conviction, although it reduced his prison sentence to three months. Kokkinakis persisted in his challenge to the ruling and after the Greek Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in April 1988 he took his case to the European Court. The petition was eventually accepted in February 1992 and the case was heard the following November in his presence. One of the nine judges declared Kokkinakis had been convicted "only for having shown such zeal, without any impropriety on his part."
