The Ayia Napa rape case 2019 This research was completed as part of the Churcher’s to Campus (C2C) courses Eva Ihezue Upper Sixth
Harriet Hall
On 17th July 2019, a British nineteen year-old, who was on a working holiday in Cyprus, gave a statement to the police claiming that she had been attacked and raped by twelve young Israelis in the Pambos Napa Rocks Hotel where she was staying . The men were arrested the same day but after eight days of detention, five of the men were released from prison as no DNA evidence was found to link them to the alleged crime. The rest of the men were released only a few days later. The reason for their release was due to the fact that the nineteen-year-old retracted her statement on 27th July after further questioning by the police. She was then charged with the Cypriot offence of Public Mischief. Public mischief is defined by the Cypriot Criminal Code as knowingly providing police with “a false statement concerning an imaginary offence,” and carries a maximum jail sentence of a year and a 1,700-euro fine. The teenager then spent more than a month in prison in the capital, Nicosia before she was granted bail at the end of August. During this time she rejected her retraction statement and said that she had been forced to produce it by the police. Regardless of this, the case was brought to trial and on 30th December, after nearly two months in trial, the Paralimni court ruled that she was guilty of causing public mischief by falsely accusing the men of raping her.
On 7th January Judge Michalis Papathanasiou gave the teenager a fourmonth sentence suspended for three years (this means that if she abides by the law for three years, she will not serve the four months in prison). The day the verdict was given she returned home. It is said that an appeal will be made against the conviction and sentence3, due to a number of events, both before and during her trail, that the lawyers defending her believe show that this was a ‘miscarriage of justice’ and greatly influenced the verdict. Michael Polak, the teenager’s lawyer for the trial and the director of Justice Abroad, says that their appeal is based on the fact that the retraction statement was given in what the teenager thought was a witness interview made ten days after her own allegation against the boys, when no lawyer or translator was present. This, he says, is a breach of The European Convention on Human Rights and also Cypriot constitutional law, which is based on the former. Polak is referring to article 6 of the Convention on Human Rights, which states that everyone has the right to a fair trial and is allowed a lawyer present in the interview and an interpreter if the questioner cannot be understood. Neither of these was present. Having a lawyer present at a police questioning is extremely important so that she or he can identify any irregularities in questions or procedures. The solicitors also advise the witness of any consequences the answers might have in a court. This is especially important in this case as the teenager had said that she was: “coerced into signing a confession revoking the criminal complaint” and did not realise that in doing so she was admitting to having given false evidence that could lead to a charge against her.
considered a suspect in a case rather than a witness. Such interviews are conducted ‘under caution’ and are recorded to be used as evidence. As nothing is recorded in police stations in Cyprus, this presented a further problem, in that there was no evidence of exactly what the teenager or the police had said in either one of her interviews. This made it difficult to prove or disprove whether she was in fact encouraged to write a retraction statement. Michael Polak stated: “After providing a further written statement, the police officer told her that he believed that she was lying about the allegations and that he wanted to help her. He told her to write a confession and that if she did not do so he would arrest her friends in Cyprus for conspiracy.” It might be said that the average person would be unlikely to withdraw a statement that was actually true. However, Doctor Kristine Tizzard, a psychologist working with the teenager, said that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The doctor explained that people suffering from PTSD have been known to make retraction statements to get out of the stressful situation. This might explain the discrepancies in the teenager’s comments, but this evidence was not taken into consideration by the judge in the trial.
“Public mischief is defined by the Cypriot Criminal Code as knowingly providing police with “a false statement concerning an imaginary offence”.
In the UK, the police are expected to inform citizens if they are potentially 20
A further criticism of the trial procedure was that the judge refused to consider evidence that a rape had been committed, claiming that the case was for public nuisance only and that the trial was not about whether a rape had been comitted. The teenager’s defence team argued that this prevented them from putting forward the evidence to show that her account was correct. The definition of public nuisance is that the statement must concern an imaginary offence. During the trial, the teenager said that she had agreed to have sex with one of the men, but that the other eleven men had burst into
