By Pali Lehohla
Simple slander is when doing right means doing wrong. For the last eleven years of writing about matters statistics, no one individual preoccupied the space as did Andreas Georgiou.
His is a marathon case and provides an incontrovertible argument of why statistics institutions must be separate and independent of political influence.
This means the interface should be highly regulated and providing total autonomy of methods to the national statistician, but the question of what to measure should obviously be a matter of politics.
In Greece the government wanted to on the one hand correctly decide on what to measure and on the other incorrectly desired also to decide how to measure.
The decadal persecution of Andreas Georgiou by the Greek government represents executive overreach in a matter regulated not only by national statutes, but one adopted as a global law, when in 2014, the United Nations General Assembly passed the United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics as global law.
But Greece is testing the validity of this in their hounding of their former national statistician who led the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT).
Two courts are now considering the matter which is up for review. The first is about his 2017 “simple slander” conviction which will be reviewed by the Supreme Court of Greece this month and the second is the European Court of Human Rights which will soon rule whether Georgiou’s rights were violated in the trial that resulted in his conviction for violation of duty. Georgiou has appealed his civil conviction of “simple slander” for making true statements.
This had to do with Georgiou unravelling what the then Eurostat honcho, Walter Rademarcher, wagging a finger referred to as ELSTAT officials cooking the books.
Georgiou had been brought in and he found that ELSTAT had suppressed the true value of the Greek debt during the financial crisis.
Thus for doing right, Georgiou is accused of doing wrong. The validity of Georgiou’s statements is not in question.
But under Greek law, one can be convicted of “simple slander” in speaking the truth, if the truth being told is embarrassing to the person about the truth is told.
In his appeal against simple slander Georgiou defended his statistics and criticised previous statistics that had intentionally concealed the true magnitude of fiscal profligacy.
Georgiou has put the statistics flag several notches up and has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights which will assess whether his human rights were violated by being sentenced after refusing to put the results to a vote.
I would wonder how to put CPI or GDP to a vote as the statistician-general?
Only the MPC puts decisions on setting numbers for levels of repo rate to a vote. Economists always poll what the GDP or CPI numbers might be.
But when the number’s rooster, the statistician-general, has spoken, all the cockerels disappear with their incoherent crows.
But in Greece no, they want a plethora of voices.
The Greek courts denied his request to put a pre-trial question to the European Court of Justice on the meaning of “sole responsibility” in the relevant EU statistical principle that states that the head of the statistical authority has “the sole responsibility for deciding on statistical methods, standards and procedures, and on the content and timing of statistical releases.”
The Greek government has argued against Georgiou and has sided with the Greek judiciary’s conviction of Georgiou for not putting the numbers to a vote.
That makes Greek statistical procedures quite entertaining, if only they have not been detrimental and draining to my friend Georgiou.
The international statistics community is woke and Georgiou is not short of support on merit as regards his technical work.
But politics oh politics, the logic of politics is squint eyed. A career in official statistics can turn you into a political statistic.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
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