Greece should get to the point where enforcing the law was no longer news, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said in an interview with Real FM radio on Sunday, in a comment on the clashes between police and rioters around Aristotle University of Thessaloniki during the night. He also noted that the numbers of "known unknown" troublemakers was constantly dwindling.

While nobody particularly wanted police intervention in universities, he added, illegal actions and the people destroying universities should not be "legitimised" and it was "self-evident" that there should be arrests. With the new legal framework, he added, "these people who destroy property - yours, ours, everyone's, the toil and taxes of Greek taxpayers," will no longer receive suspended sentences but go to jail and serve a major part of their sentence if they are found guilty.

"Therefore, they will think twice and many times when, instead of doing something worthwhile with their lives, they go about destroying the property of their fellow citizens or the public property that belongs to Greek taxpayers," he added.

"We are a few weeks away from a historic reform, primarily for state universities - since 70 pct of this law concerns the state universities, their reinforcement, financing, strengthening and collaboration with major universities abroad, the freedoms they are receiving, demands that [university authorities] and students have been making of the state for years and which the state has now heard. And, of course, the founding of non-state university branches. In this context, the 'known unknowns' who are becoming ever fewer... have decided of their own accord to occupy some schools - about a third of schools where once it would have been all of them. Where the authorities were called, they intervened," Marinakis said.

He noted that the government was making an even fairer and more comprehensive change to the penal code, aiming at strict and fair but not punitive penalties, at real penalties where actual time served was much closer to nominal sentences and the delivery of justice was faster. He also pointed to many changes supporting the victims in cases of domestic violence, sexual abuse and others, and an end to "automatic” release for prisoners who had served a certain proportion of their sentence, which would now be at the discretion of a Judicial Council based on a series of criteria.

Marinakis concluded by announcing a pre-electoral New Democracy congress in the next few weeks, adding that the party’s list of candidates in the EuroParliament elections will be announced in April.