British Woman Ayia Napa Sentenced For False Rape Claim To Appeal
The woman, then 19, told Cypriot police a group of 12 Israeli men had raped her in Ayia Napa in July 2019. The Derbyshire teenager retracted the allegation after being held without a lawyer and was then tried and convicted of causing public mischief.
The Cypriot Supreme Court will now hear her appeal on 16 September. If the conviction is not overturned, her legal team intends to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
"She wants to get on with life, but for her to get on with the life, she needs to get this conviction overturned," said barrister Michael Polak, who is helping the woman in his role as director of the law firm Justice Abroad.
"This will be on her record. It means any time she applies to join an association or for a job, she will be thinking back to this and what's happened to her.
"So it's essential to her, even though she's not in prison now, she's back in the United Kingdom, she needs to overturn the conviction for that reason."Her case outraged women's rights groups, who protested outside court ahead of the sentencing in January 2020.
Judge Michalis Papathanasiou gave the teenager a four-month suspended sentence, which meant she could return to the UK. She will not have to return to Cyprus for the appeal hearing.
"We will be arguing that the conviction is unsafe for several reasons, and we are hoping the Supreme Court will set aside the conviction," said Mr Polak. One of these arguments will be that the judge did not consider the evidence the woman really was raped.
"For public mischief, you need to be making a false allegation, and every time we brought forward evidence that the rape took place, he would shout at our female Cypriot lawyers and say, 'this is not a rape trial, this is not a rape trial'," said Mr Polak.
"He did it about seven times during the trial process, so in effect, he shut out any consideration that the rape had taken place, which meant he didn't properly consider all the elements of the offence."
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