Sorras charged with inciting hate in comments about disabled
An Athens first-instance prosecutor on Friday leveled hate crime charges against self-proclaimed “trillionaire” and leader of the nationalist Convention of Greeks movement Artemis Sorras, over comments made last year disparaging the disabled.
The case against the controversial figure – who claims to have enough money to pay off Greece’s public debt and all the debts of Greek households – concerns comments Sorras made in an interview on September 8, 2016, to the Rizopoulos Post website, in which he said that “it is an insult to the Olympic Games to have disabled people doing Paralympics.”
The following day, Sorras responded to criticism with a post on Facebook in which he said he would not take back a single word of the interview and added that he thought the Paralympic Games “are a huge insult and sacrilege to everyone, imposed on the planet by animals.”
The charges come under Greece’s racism and hate crime laws and are a misdemeanor, though Sorras is also under investigation for more serious crimes related to his own and his organization’s activities and finances.
