Students who are arrested for criminal offences on university campuses will lose their status as students for a period of two years and then, depending on the verdict of the courts, either return or be permanently expelled from the student body, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said in a interview on SKAI television on Saturday.
"You did something? You got arrested? The police verify this? With declaratory effect, your student status is suspended for two years and if you are finally convicted, you are kicked out of university, without any involvement of the human factor, in other words the targeting of a student, professor, rector by the students. Which students? The diseased minorities," Marinakis said, outlining the toughening of the framework to deal with violence and crime within universities and technical educational institutes.
Among the new measures, Marinakis added, is controlled access and civil compensation for damage to university property, which will be charged to the culprit's tax number.
"Violence in universities is one of the greatest scourges of the post-junta era," the spokesperson noted, stressing that those who broke and destroyed things will have to pay, or have the debt charged to their tax records. He stressed the need to speed up criminal proceedings for crimes in universities while denying that the measures were punitive.
"There have to be consequences, without any punitive intent but with a desire for cooperation and respect for the law," he said, adding that the state must not give offenders margins to act, either on campuses or in stadiums.