Cassation Appeal Before the Supreme Court (Areios Pagos)

Cassation is the ultimate legal remedy by which a decision of the Court of Appeal is challenged before the Supreme Court. The fundamental difference is that the Supreme Court is exclusively a court of law, not of fact. It will not retry the facts, will not examine witnesses, and will not decide whether you are guilty or innocent on the basis of the circumstances. It reviews strictly and solely whether the Court of Appeal applied the law correctly and observed all the procedural guarantees.

Yes, and in many cases it is essential. A cassation case calls for an entirely different mindset and scientific specialisation from the courtroom battle. Your new lawyer will isolate the written text of the appellate judgment, identify the internal contradictions, the leaps in logic and the legal errors of the judges, and draft a technically flawless pleading that will compel the Supreme Court to “tear down” your conviction.

Emphatically not. The Supreme Court hears the case with the Court of Appeal’s file “closed”. Examining witnesses and producing new evidence relating to the facts is not permitted. The court will rely exclusively on the record and the text of the decision we are challenging, checking whether the appellate judges committed one of the errors exhaustively defined by law.

Here the exact opposite of the criminal appeal applies. Before the Supreme Court, additional grounds of cassation may be filed by way of a separate, new pleading. The law’s strict condition is that the pleading of additional grounds be lodged with the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court no later than 15 days before the scheduled hearing, so that they can be studied by the rapporteur judge.

The Constitution requires every judicial decision to be fully reasoned. There is a lack of reasoning where the appellate judges convicted you using general, vague or formulaic expressions, without clearly explaining which specific pieces of evidence persuaded them, what their line of reasoning was, and how they reached the conclusion of guilt — leaving gaps and doubts.

Lodging a cassation appeal does not automatically freeze the sentence, if the Court of Appeal had ordered it to be enforced. However, the law gives you the right to file at once an application to suspend the execution of the sentence (or of the remainder of it) until the Supreme Court delivers its decision. Our office handles these applications as a priority, making the case that the cassation appeal is likely to succeed in order to secure your liberty.

No — provided the cassation appeal is brought by you. The fundamental principle prohibiting any worsening of the accused’s position applies without exception. The Supreme Court cannot impose a heavier sentence on you, nor convert a suspended sentence into an enforceable one. The Supreme Court may either dismiss your application, keeping the Court of Appeal’s sentence, or allow it and vindicate you.

Cassation is an exceptionally powerful ally against time. If, while your case is pending before the Supreme Court or at its hearing, the limitation period for the offence is completed, the court — provided the cassation appeal is formally admissible — examines limitation of its own motion and permanently discontinues the prosecution, discharging you.

In most cases, when the Supreme Court allows the cassation appeal, it quashes the contested decision and remits the case to the court that issued it to be tried again from the beginning. The great victory is that the new hearing before the Court of Appeal must be conducted by an entirely different panel of judges, who are bound by the legal rulings of the Supreme Court.

Because cybercrime, and often sexual offences too, turn on technical concepts (IPs, forensics, metadata) that traditional courts frequently misinterpret, leading to unjust convictions. With our dual expertise (criminal lawyers & computer engineers), we translate the appellate judges’ technical errors into fundamental legal grounds of cassation —such as the breach of the right to a defence or the total lack of reasoning on the digital evidence— securing the best possible outcome.