Authorities in Cyprus are being urged to launch a fresh inquiry into a gang rape complaint by a British woman after the country’s supreme court acquitted her of fabricating the claim that she had been sexually assaulted at a holiday resort.
The 21-year-old’s legal team said it was incumbent on the island’s police force to reopen the investigation in the wake of the landmark ruling. “It’s our next big battle,” said the human rights lawyer Nicoletta Charalambidou.
The three-member tribunal threw out the case on Monday, acknowledging that the Briton had not been given a fair trial. The verdict was announced two years after the then teenager was found guilty of making up the gang rape allegation and handed a suspended four-month sentence for fomenting public mischief.
Michael Polak, who had coordinated the appeal against the conviction as head of the legal aid group Justice Abroad, told the Guardian it was critical a new investigation be initiated if justice was to be properly rendered as the initial inquiry had breached standards. “Cypriot authorities now have a duty to properly investigate the rape complaint because it is clear that was never done,” he said.
“We want the investigation to be transferred to a different police force so that all the evidence in this case can be considered fairly and dispassionately.”
The verdict, he said, had been achieved “against the odds.”
Persefoni Panayi, the British-born president of the supreme court, had upheld the appeal in favour of the conviction being dropped, although jurists were divided, with one voting against.
The Derbyshire student, who is attending university in the UK, had described in detail how she was gang-raped by up to 12 Israelis in a hotel room in Ayia Napa in July 2019. She had threatened to go to the European court of human rights if the bid to clear her name failed.
The guilty verdict, handed down by the district court judge Michalis Papathanasiou, had hinged on the Briton allegedly admitting that she had falsified her original complaint. Her defence team had argued that the handwritten confession, which formed the basis of the prosecution case, was extracted under duress, in the absence of a lawyer, or translator, after more than seven hours of police questioning.
Papathanasiou had repeatedly refused to allow the defendant, as she stood in the dock, to speak about the assault, saying: “This is not a rape trial.”
The retraction allowed the alleged assailants, who were aged between 15 and 22 and included the sons of senior Israeli officials, to return home immediately.
The woman’s status changed overnight, from victim to suspect, and she spent four weeks in Nicosia general prison before being ordered to remain on the Mediterranean island for court proceedings that would drag on for six months.
The student, who has never been publicly named, was not in Nicosia to hear the news on Monday. Her lawyers described her as still being too traumatised to travel.
But in a statement, her mother responded to the outcome, saying: “It is a great relief we hear that the authorities in Cyprus have recognised the flaws in their legal process. Whilst this decision doesn’t excuse the way she was treated by the police, the judge or those in authority, it does bring with it the hope that my daughter’s suffering will at least bring positive changes in the way victims of crime are treated.”
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