The disciplinary panel at the Greek Supreme Court in Athens has dismissed 20 judges and prosecutors over the past ten months for lack of work.

Only recently five lawyers were fired, the newspaper "To Proto Thema" reported on Tuesday. The background is an enormously high number of unprocessed procedures, it said. The lawyers concerned are responsible for the delays; they would have shone above all through laziness, incompetence and absence.

The situation at the Supreme Administrative Court StE is particularly worrying - a huge number of cases are pending there, and the decisions have been delayed by up to 19 years in some cases. The Court of Auditors is also completely overburdened with 122,000 pending cases and is hopelessly behind schedule.

However, it is not only judges and public prosecutors who are responsible for the poor state of Greek courts. Rather, the system is completely outdated. For example, employees at the courts report stacks of files and sometimes even handwritten documents that have to be transported back and forth in shopping trolleys. In the meantime, so many cases are pending that numerous proceedings have been discontinued due to the statute of limitations.