On 11 December 2022, the newspaper Documento revealed that the MP and Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Kostis Hatzidakis, had been under surveillance by the National Intelligence Service for at least two years, while he was Minister of Environment and Energy, on the grounds of national security.
A document from the Intelligence Service shows that the minister was under surveillance from 21 November 2020 to 17 November 2021, i.e. for one year. However, the surveillance appears to have been in place for a longer period of time, because the surveillance records include a communication between Hatzidakis and journalist Thanasis Koukakis, which took place on December 24, 2019.
The surveillance therefore appears to have been initiated shortly after New Democracy won the 2019 elections and brought the Intelligence Service under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister’s office. The Prime Minister’s nephew, Gregory Dimitriadis, was placed as the Prime Minister’s Secretary General and the political head of the National Intelligence Service.
Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees the absolute inviolability of citizens’ communications and therefore the surveillance of a serving government minister raises issues of compatibility with the Constitution and with the rule of law more generally.
Furthermore, Professor of Constitutional Law of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and former Deputy Prime Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, has argued that the lifting of the privacy of the communications of an MP or MEP is illegal.
Although Article 19 of the Constitution guarantees the absolute inviolability of the confidentiality of communications, MP Kostis Hatzidakis was surveilled by the National Intelligence Service, raising serious issues with democracy and the rule of law in Greece.
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