[Update from Prof Kostakopoulou]

Dear Students, Colleagues, Friends and Supporters,

I continue to be grateful for your support in connection with this petition and my quest for justice in 2020. This is a short update since many of you knew that, following a difficult and injurious waiting period of 3,5 years for the determination of my victimisation and unfair dismissal complaints, my case would finally be heard at Birmingham Employment Tribunal this August. The final merits hearing was due to start on 24 July 2023 and to finish on 11 August 2023. 

The final hearing was listed a year ago, on 21 July 2022, and, since then, I have been counting the days. Waiting for justice to be done was not an easy process, particularly when one is innocent and suffering has been so unnecessary.  

But, I must confess, the prospect of the final hearing was making my reflective gazing into prolonged injustice more bearable. At times, I could forget that Birmingham Employment Tribunal and the appellate courts had caused and, in turn, sanctioned excessive delays in the disposal my cases. I could stop obsessing about the fact that my interim relief hearing in 2020 had not been organised promptly because the judge had apparently overlooked my application; that tribunal staff were not sending the particulars of my claim to the University of Warwick for nearly three months; that the interim relief hearing took place without my presence and without any of my documents and the judge delayed a reconsideration of her decision refusing interim relief for seven months (- an act of judicial misconduct, I believe); that on the eve of a hearing the regional employment judge decided to cancel it without giving us a reason and then to reschedule it seven months later; that applications of mine to the tribunal were left unaddressed for more than six months while the tribunal was persistently refusing to acknowledge correspondence and applications for months; how my pleas for the tribunal to list the final hearing were disregarded and a judge decided to delay further the process by planning a two hour preliminary hearing by telephone in seven months’ time; that all my appeals to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) and to the Court of Appeal about breaches of the European Convention of Human Rights, the reasonable time guarantees of Article 6(1) ECHR and due process, and the need to transfer my cases away from Birmingham employment tribunal were denied without a careful and adequate examination of my legal submissions and adequate legal reasoning; all the strategies designed to delay justice, weaken my claims and to force me to discontinue the litigation; the stress, burden and costs of having to go through eight preliminary hearings often requested by the University of Warwick and, generally speaking, the manifest disregard for my rights under UK and international laws and the real injuries to my personhood, career, reputation and health I had been sustaining for years without redress or empathy.

On 21 July 2022, that is, when E. J. Woffenden listed the final hearing for 24 July 2023 (- a 12 months’ delay), my cases had considerably exceeded the mean age of disposal of cases according to governmental statistics. Such a differential treatment was only augmenting my injuries and distress. I compiled statistics following my research of 585 unfair dismissal decisions and submitted them to the EAT. My case was an outlier. I complained about the judicial failure to address this issue and to investigate the underlying breach of the principles of equality and non-discrimination under national law, the ECHR and EU law. I argued that Birmingham Employment tribunal was inappropriately holding up the joined cases of victimisation for defending equality law and for whistleblowing and of unfair dismissal for two and half years and two years, respectively, without any actual progression while at the same time was causing to an innocent party an economic haemorrhage, significant distress, career damage, endless correspondence and hearing costs.  

But, at least, in 2023 I had something to look forward to, namely, the final hearing and an end to my ordeal. When spring 2023 arrived, I felt optimistic as I could at least make some plans. 

What I had not anticipated was that there would be no final hearing and thus no opportunity for truth to shine, no justice and no remedy.

On the eve of the final hearing the University of Warwick submitted a strike out bundle of more than 600 pages to the tribunal without informing me. Then on 24 July 2023 the judge closed the public hearing and observers who had been given a weblink could not attend for two days. I was put under enormous and inappropriate pressure to forego my complaints about human rights breaches and EU law-related violations in the context of my mistreatment (- the ‘European jurisprudence’, according to the judge) and then my entire claim was struck out thereby denying me access to justice. 

In addition, the judge had deliberately depicted me negatively in his judgment; I had allegedly behaved ‘unreasonably’ despite the fact I was assisting the tribunal – a common strategy of secondary victimisation. 

I was devastated. I returned home and kept looking at Magna Carta’s clause 40 on the door of our fridge:

‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’.

I asked my husband how it is possible in the 21st century to witness the English judicial system’s disregard for such an important principle, which was the basis for the development of English law from the 14th to the 17th centuries and which was then exported to the US and other countries. After all, this is not ‘European jurisprudence’, which the Birmingham employment tribunal judge was so keen to differentiate from national law behind the tribunal’s closed doors on 24 and 25 July 2023. It is, instead, the law of the land.  

‘Is this country returning to the 11th century?’, I asked him.

‘Principles are sacrificed to protect interests and to cover up wrongdoing, Dora. The University of Warwick would never allow the facts surrounding your mistreatment, the abuse of your rights and their breaches of the law to surface in public’, he said.

‘Yes, but everyone is equal before the law. And equality, protection of fundamental rights and effective judicial protection including access to justice are the necessary ingredients of the rule of law’, I replied. 

‘Without respect for the rule of law, democracy is damaged. Have they now become cherished illusions? I cannot betray my value system and everything I have written about and taught to more than 20,000 students over the last thirty years. I will continue the fight’, I said.  

Dora Kostakopoulou, August 2023.