A simple man who has got to where he is today through hard work is how the current Attorney-general describes himself. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
On the walls of the corridor leading to the Attorney-general’s office in Nicosia, past the shelves stacked with law books and precedents, are framed photos of all previous Attorneys-general dating back to 1898. Every day, when current incumbent Petros Clerides goes to work, he has to walk this gauntlet of grave, respectable faces – from Sir Alfred Lascelles, back when the position was known as King’s Advocate, all the way to his own predecessor Solon Nikitas – and feel their eyes measuring his steps as he walks to the office he’s occupied for the past four years.
The pressure of wanting to outdo these illustrious predecessors, to ensure that – when his own time is up, and his own photo is added to the procession on the wall – his successor will be painfully aware of Petros Clerides’ own eyes on him as he walks to work, is the kind of thing that might drive hyper-competitive high achievers to distraction. Fortunately, Clerides doesn’t seem to be a hyper-competitive high achiever. “My only goal is to leave this post and have a good name, nothing more,” he tells me, sitting at the file-strewn conference table that takes up half the office. “Not even in my most ambitious dreams did I ever imagine that I’d hold this position. And I say that with all honesty.”
The Attorney-general’s job is massive, of course. Clerides himself works a 12-hour day with a small break for lunch, coming in around 8 in the morning and leaving around 8 in the evening, just before the News – but, as he puts it, “if the Attorney-general decided to stay in his office 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he’d never run out of work to do”.
First of all, he has jurisdiction over all criminal cases, deciding whether a case should go forward or be withdrawn (via the so-called nolle prosequi). He even has authority over private criminal cases, so if a citizen takes another citizen to court for (say) assault, or a bounced cheque, the Attorney-general can intervene and either stop the case or take over the prosecution. He decides whether to apply for a European Arrest Warrant. He decides if a child should be made a ward of court. He decides whether to supply legal aid to non-Cypriots. All this, however, is only one side of the equation – because the Attorney-general is also legal advisor to the government, meaning he gives opinions, interprets laws, studies contracts, represents the State in all court cases and (last but not least) represents the Republic in all international courts, a huge responsibility given the legal thickets of the Cyprus Problem.
Yet Clerides remains, he says, “a simple man”, refusing to put on the high-powered airs seemingly demanded by the job. His appearance helps – which is surely a conscious decision, at least in part. You can’t be a public figure and not think occasionally about the way you look – and Clerides must know that he looks benevolent, like a kindly uncle. His chubby face, bald pate and bushy white moustache make him look older than he is (he’s 64), like an embodiment of an older Cyprus – implicitly a better, more benign place than the Cyprus he’s so often associated with through his job, with its overdosing junkies, crooked cops beating up innocent people and paedophiles stalking children on the internet.
Much of that, of course, is perception, not reality – and maybe Clerides’ man-of-the-people persona is also a put-on, but I doubt it. For one thing, he’s disarmingly honest about his own limitations – the fact, for instance, that he’s spent almost all his professional career in the Law Office of the Republic (he joined at 28 as a legal assistant) and therefore can’t compare his job with that of a private lawyer. He’s also entirely unpretentious about his talents, making clear it was hard work and diligence that got him where he is today:
“I don’t claim to be a skilled lawyer,” he admits with jaw-dropping frankness. “But I do say that I’ve worked harder in this Office than anyone else. If there’s one reason why I rose to prominence, it’s my work ethic. I don’t claim to be a legal expert with deep knowledge, no. But I’ve really worked for this Office.”
I suspect it’s always been a struggle. He was born in what he calls a “petit-petit-bourgeois family” – his father owned a small glassware shop on Ermou Street, in now-occupied Old Nicosia – and went to university in Athens after much toil (“with one-thousand-and-two struggles,” to give the literal translation of the Greek phrase he uses). He doesn’t say if the toil was academic or financial, but it’s probably a little of both. The initial plan was to be a civil engineer, but his grades weren’t good enough for the Athens Polytechnic – his last year of high-school had been disrupted by the events of 1963 in Cyprus – and instead he turned to Law. What kind of person was he as a young man? “Well, I’d say I was more restless than most of my peers,” he offers. In what way? “First of all, I wasn’t… How can I put this? I wasn’t the most well-behaved student, to tell the truth.”
He wasn’t political, he hastens to add, nor did he get involved in ’63: “I’d never get involved in such things. I never thought the matter of Greek and Turkish Cypriots was a matter of armed confrontation, then or now… Things happened which both communities should be ashamed of, our side especially perhaps”. His teenage shenanigans were more the result of a too-strict environment, things like talking in class or going to the cinema – these were “deadly sins” at the time. “I wasn’t the best student, in that sense,” he admits. “Or the most regular student.” Nowadays we’d say he just wasn’t very academic.
The fact that Clerides is a member of an older generation – probably the last Attorney-general we’ll have who remembers the EOKA struggle, maybe one of the last who remembers the Turkish invasion – does sometimes come through, as when he mentions a meeting he recently had with the parents of a young man who was killed by another young man. “These are unheard-of things!” he marvels. During his childhood there was once a murder in Paphos, he recalls by way of contrast – and so rare and shocking was it deemed that, when the guilty verdict was announced, newspapers brought out a special afternoon issue just to report it! On the other hand, the fact that he used to be something of a ‘bad boy’ himself may (subconsciously, perhaps) plays a role in how freely he uses his nolle prosequi powers to give people a second chance.
Is there pressure? Phone calls from high places, asking him to drop cases? It would be idle to pretend the Attorney-general doesn’t live in Cyprus society, he parries diplomatically – “but I can tell you that my conscience is clear in this department, that I’ve done nothing to feel guilty or ashamed of”. Nonetheless, his office withdraws an average of three to four cases every day – mostly arguments or family quarrels, escalated in the heat of the moment, where the parties have now reconciled. Just this morning, he used his powers to halt a case against three young Britons, arrested for possession of 0.02kg of cannabis in 2006. Four years ago, he points out, spreading his arms in supplication; “three English kids, a pellara [silly thing to do]… Of course I withdraw them! And I’ll continue to withdraw them.”
There are those who think Petros Clerides should be more active, that the law in Cyprus is struggling to keep up with a changing world. Cyber-crime is one concern, though he points out that “Cyprus was a pioneer” in signing international agreements and enshrining them into law. “There aren’t many things left to do in this field,” he adds. “What must happen is that parents need to start being more careful. The internet is a dangerous tool, in the same way that knives, for instance, are dangerous tools”. He acknowledges the recent outcry over cyber-stalkers, but insists that “excessive publicity has been given to this matter”.
A more pressing concern are the institutional failures exposed, for instance, by the Kitas case – and it’s slightly unnerving when Clerides admits that “almost all our institutions [in Cyprus] are in trouble”. Well… shouldn’t we be doing something about this? Of course, he agrees, but this kind of thing is inevitable in an “unstable society” where everyone’s attention is focused on the Cyprus Problem and other issues get neglected. “For example, the most important aspect of a place is Culture,” he adds somewhat surprisingly. “Where’s our culture in Cyprus? It’s non-existent… Go to any beach in the summer, and look at all the foreigners holding a book and reading it. It could be anything, but at least they’re reading. Now, have you ever seen a Cypriot sitting somewhere holding a book?”
He himself likes History, he adds (he’s currently reading about the Byzantine period), part of the quiet lifestyle he and his wife have always espoused (they have two grown-up sons in their early 30s). “We don’t have – we’ve never had – an intense social life,” shrugs Clerides. “We’ve never wanted it, and I still don’t want it. If you could see, when I’m in here with my secretary, how many invitations I get on a daily basis and decline almost all of them, you’d be surprised”. Somewhat reluctantly, he attends the government events – it’s part of the job – but avoids the social ones, “because I don’t enjoy them, simple as that”. He has no hobbies, doesn’t collect stamps, and boats make him seasick. When he’s not in the office it’s a bit of dinner, a bit of telly, maybe a night out with friends “somewhere quiet”. “I don’t like attention, in either sense. No matter if it’s people praising your actions or criticising them – I don’t like either one.”
Some would say that puts him in the wrong job – because being Attorney-general often gets you a lot of unwanted attention nowadays. But Petros Clerides begs to differ: “The Attorney-general doesn’t have to show any face to the world,” he insists. “He doesn’t have to be popular, or to be in the limelight. The Attorney-general must humbly do his job, as laid down by law.”
How does he think people view him? “I think people view me the way they’ve always viewed me. As a simple man,” he replies. “I walk around Nicosia quite a lot – I’m in love with Old Nicosia, it’s where I grew up, I go there almost every day… I look at people as I walk, and I think they look at me in the same way. As one of them”. Outside in the corridor, a century’s collection of framed Attorneys-general gasp in astonishment.
