Police brutality

Greece must urgently reform its prison system and end police violence, the Council of Europe's anti-torture committee said in its report compiled after a visit to prisons in the country in 2019.

The deployment of hundreds of riot police on the islands of Lesvos and Chios was intended as a display of governmental decisiveness in building closed detention centres to house migrants and refugees, but the operation boomeranged with dramatic clashes between islanders and police receiving intense media coverage and mutual recriminations between protesting residents who charged extensive polic

A police operation was underway on Saturday to remove anarchists from two recently evacuated squats in the district of Koukaki in central Athens.

The buildings on 45 Matrozou and 21 Panetolikou Streets had been cleared by riot police in a sweeping operation on December 18 last year, but anarchists returned on Saturday afternoon, according to media reports.

French police used tear gas to disperse protesters in front of President Emmanuel Macron's party headquarters, DPA and BTA reported. The protest was held against the background of the ongoing strike against the pension reform.

Dozens of protesters fled after being covered by thick clouds of tear gas in the narrow streets near the Paris Opera House. 

Following a spike in complaints of police brutality, the Citizens' Protection Ministry is reinstating a 2010 directive obliging riot police officers (MAT) to clearly display their name and badge number.

Lower court prosecutor Vangelis Ioannidis has ordered an emergency probe of a 18 December police raid in Koukaki where riot police went to evacuate an occupied building and ended up raiding the next door house and beating the owner, known director Dimitris Indares, who with his two sons were on the roof of their home.

A lawmaker with Greece's main opposition party on Thursday slammed the excessive police violence during a raid in the Athenian district of Koukaki on Wednesday morning and claimed that a woman was shot in close range by a plastic bullet.

Police officers are seen entering an occupied building in the Athens neighborhood of Koukaki, one of three squats cleared early on Sunday. Nine people - seven Greeks and two foreign nationals - were arrested. Among those detained were two men and their father who were in a building that the police entered to gain access to one of the squats and who allegedly attempted to stop the officers.

A father and his two sons who were arrested during a police raid on anarchist squats in the downtown Athens district of Koukaki on Wednesday were taken to hospital from police custody.

Citizens' Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis on Wednesday responded to a letter from jurist and academic Nikos Alivizatos, who heads a committee established by the minister to monitor police behavior, regarding allegations of police brutality during a crackdown on anarchist squats in the downtown Athens district of Koukaki earlier in the day.