Greece’s education ministry threatened to “deprive” parents of “custody” over their children on Thursday if they refuse to comply with masking and testing mandates enforced on primary and secondary school students during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Alexandros Koptsis, the general secretary for primary and secondary education at Greece’s education ministry, told Al Jazeera on December 9 his ministry was actively encouraging Greek public school staff “to call prosecutors” and establish a criminal case against parents who refuse to send their children to school to avoid subjecting them to federal masking and testing mandates imposed by the public school system.
“If a prosecutor deems it necessary, parents could even be deprived of custody,” Koptsis recently told a Greek radio station. Koptsis described parents keeping their children home from school over pandemic measures as intolerable and opposition to masking children “inconceivable.”
He told Al Jazeera on Thursday his threat to parents “was based on standing law” and was “entirely up to prosecutors.”
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) recommends that children over 12 use masks like adults, but discourages masking children under five years old. For those in between, the U.N. agency recommends weighing a series of factors that include “the ability of the child to safely and appropriately use a mask” and “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development.”
In addition to potentially losing custody of their children, Greek parents could also face jail time and fines if they choose to keep their children home from school to avoid mask and testing mandates.
Greece’s parliament “legislated an amendment to the penal code on Tuesday [December 7]” that increases penalties for such compliance refusals.
“Parents who do not send their children to school because of COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] measures will face a two-year prison sentence and a fine,” Al Jazeera reported on December 9.
Greece’s Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs has not disclosed exactly how many reports it has received concerning parents keeping their children home from school, though ministry sources told Al Jazeera on Thursday “they are in the dozens.”
The Greek public system first encountered absence issues last year as a direct result of Athen’s decision to impose mandatory coronavirus masking and testing requirements on students.
“Students [across Greece] attended school in person in September 2020, but a [nationwide] lockdown was ordered from October to May 2021, during which students attended school virtually,” Al Jazeera recalled.
“Students were allowed to return to school for the last six weeks of the academic year wearing masks and doing two self-tests a week,” according to the news outlet.
Greek parents opposed to the mandates chose to keep their children home for the last six weeks of the academic year instead of sending them into a school system where they would be forced to comply with such measures.
A group of parents in northern Greece’s Macedonia region took a more extreme approach to oppose school mask mandates this week, according to the Greek newspaper the Kathimerini. About ten parents conducted a citizens arrest of a principal who had forced students to wear masks in class at a secondary school in Pieria, a regional unit of Macedonia, this week.
The parents “barged into a high school in central Macedonia, grabbed the school principal, handcuffed him and dragged him to the local police station claiming they had ‘arrested’ him for enforcing measures against Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus],” the newspaper reported on December 10.
“As soon as they arrived at the police station, the attackers were arrested and sent to the police’s security division of Katerini, while the school principal was released,” according to Kathimerini. Katerini is the capital city of Pieria.
Greece’s federal government ordered a three-week nationwide lockdown on November 4 in an effort to curb coronavirus transmission across the country. The measure forced all secondary schools in Greece to shut down for nearly a month.
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