CCPR/C/126/D/2582/2015 Author’s comments on the State party’s observations on admissibility 5.1 In comments dated 1 June 2015, the author contests the State party’s claim that the communication contains insufficient information. The author’s whereabouts after his eviction from the Votanikos area in Athens in June 2007 are irrelevant. It is routine practice for non-governmental organizations to provide their own addresses for correspondence, given that the individuals they represent are in precarious situations and move often. In any case, the author was registered with the regional and central government authorities for his residence permit. When the communication was submitted, the author was living with his family in the Athens area. 5.2 Regarding the alleged abuse of the right of submission, the author maintains that his counsel filed complaints on behalf of the author and other Roma in a timely manner, and that those complaints led to the criminal trial several years later. The complaint filed in December 2006 was initially closed in April 2009, when the appeals court prosecutor of Patras issued a final decree archiving the case. However, in April 2011, the author’s counsel filed a request to reopen the criminal case “for all Roma”. In June 2011, the request was granted, and the author thus again became a civil claimant in the criminal proceedings against the alleged perpetrators of his eviction. He had no reason to seek another remedy until the trial concluded through the issuance of a final judgment in December 2012. That is when the author’s time limit for submitting a communication began to run. Counsel also responds to the State party’s other claims concerning the alleged abuse of the right of submission. 5.3 The communication is substantiated and has merit and a concrete factual basis. The circumstances of the eviction were clearly presented and were accepted by the domestic court, which never stated that the facts were unclear, but considered instead that the eviction had not been conducted in accordance with standard legal procedures for reasons of public health. Moreover, any alleged discrepancies between the Greek-language court minutes and the content of the English-language communication are explained by the fact that court minutes are not verbatim transcripts, but are instead mere summaries. The State party has not provided an English translation of the court minutes. 5.4 The author acknowledges that at the time of the eviction, he was residing in Zakynthos for the summer. However, this was also the case for the authors in Georgopoulos et al. v. Greece. Moreover, neither the authors in the Georgopoulos case nor the author of the present communication owned the homes from which they were evicted. State party’s observations on the merits 6.1 In its observations dated 20 November 2015, the State party reiterates its previous arguments and adds the following claims. It was proven during domestic proceedings that during the eviction in the Makrygianni settlement on 27 July 2006, at least 6 of the 10 sheds that had been torn down belonged to individuals who had definitively abandoned them after having accepted a rental subsidy to find alternative accommodation. Moreover, it was established before the Patras court that after the departure of the subsidy beneficiaries, the settlement gave a general impression of abandonment, and was partly covered with debris of demolished and semi-demolished sheds that needed to be cleared away in order to protect public health. Moreover, it was also indicated that certain makeshift houses had been completely or partly torn down by unidentified persons who were probably looking for building materials. Thus, the cleaning services of the municipality of Patras reasonably believed, when tearing down the shed which the author did not lawfully own, that they were not demolishing a house in use and evicting a resident. The shed did not appear to be inhabited by any person, nor by the author in particular. The author himself had provided a different address for his residence permit and did not present himself to any authorities to protest against the destruction of this “home”. He was thus completely unknown to the municipality’s authorities. The only information available about the author was that provided during the criminal proceedings before the Three-Member Misdemeanour Court of Patras, and the author did not even present himself during that trial, either. 6.2 In view of the above-mentioned facts, it was not possible for the authorities to consider offering alternative accommodation to the author or otherwise supporting him. On 6