UK law professor with ‘profound sense of grievance’ banned from courts

Dora Kostakopoulou is a Visiting Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public Policy at KU Leuven University and was the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU (June 2020 – June 2023). My site provides information about my publications and presentations.

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On the day of the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016), Professor Probert, former Head of Warwick Law School, wrote a letter of commencement of disciplinary proceedings against me. I protested and complained to the Director of HR and to Professor Croft, Vice Chancellor of Warwick University, on 9 July 2016 outlining the breaches of natural justice, the law and the University’s procedures. On 22 July 2016, Professor Croft invited me to submit a grievance, but, following my second letter of 24 July 2016 detailing the substantive unfairness of Professor Probert’s actions, Professor Croft threatened me with dismissal and suspended me on the basis of concocted, false and malevolent accusations which continue to be baseless since 2016. Professor Croft had disregarded my natural justice-based right to be heard and to refute his bullying, vexatious allegations by providing the relevant evidence. I was on annual leave, and within a few days, I was experiencing severe anxiety, panic attacks, chest pains, shaking and sleeplessness. My treatment was abusive and degrading; even when I wrote to Professor Croft evidencing my innocence, he ignored my letter for 50 days and he continued to keep me in suspension. I subsequently made 18 Requests for Further Information during the course of legal proceedings for basic factual information on what I was supposed to have done wrong, when, how and to whom, in order for Professor Croft to (falsely) accuse me and suspend me, but all of them were resisted by the University of Warwick and the UK tribunals. Professor Croft knew that the information contained in his letter of 2 August 2016 was false and that would cause severe distress and mental injuries because he had also been involved in the protracted suspension of another Professor at Warwick University, who was also innocent, Professor Docherty. I am not sure whether he knew that his letter to me could also activate the criminal offences envisaged under s 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1998 and s 127 of the Communications Act 2003. Professor Croft never apologised to me. Nor did he resign from his office for making false and unsubstantiated accusations in order to harm an innocent whistle-blower and to encroach on my fundamental rights and interests unlawfully.

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I was also profoundly affected by the unlawful surveillance of my email communications at work and telephone conversations. This was not covert because the ultimate aim was for me to know that I was under surveillance and thus to be affected psychologically and mentally. The information derived from the surveillance was then used to sabotage and disrupt my professional activities. I recall that while I was attending a European Commission conference abroad for a few days, I had received in my University of Warwick

inbox c. 30 spam messages from this address:

j.p.monfort.special.warning@balkanland.us.

Hundreds of spam, fishing and malware containing emails, some of which were falsely depicted as having my established contacts as sources, were sent to me. My private email addresses, my home telephone landline and mobile communications were also targeted. Some offending IP addresses were:

142.250.113.27; 75.126.251.247; 64.233.168.26; 64.233.180.27; 172.217.195.26; 173.194.199.27; 138.205.128.8; 65.55.33.135).

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Some of the spam emails I was receiving had an explicit sexual content (e.g. those sent to my Warwick University email inbox from someone at precisionbikes.com and masee.com). The above was reported on different occasions to bodies outside the University (Metropolitan Police, Action Fraud, Staffordshire police, BT, the Home Office, Virgin Media) and to the University of Warwick (IT services, security services, the Registrar of the University and Sir Normington, the Chair of the Council of the University of Warwick). There was no relief for years. There were also regular unauthorised interventions to my personal University staff webpage without my knowledge changing the information on my publications I had placed there, removing my PhD students, adding false co-authors of my work and so on with a view to damage my standing and reputation as well as the insertion of false information onto my employment file without my knowledge – a breach of data protection law which through a complaint to the Information Commissioner (took several years to rectify via the elimination of the objectionable material by the University of Warwick.

As the 2019 UK general election was approaching, the images of my publications disappeared from yahoo, while on Google one could see my published work (publication title) aligned to a different Brexit related image and, in turn, to sexist and obscene images in the aftermath of the election of Mr Boris Johnson.

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On 9 June 2019 I complained to Sir David Normington, Chair of the Council of the University of Warwick about an email apparently containing a death threat which seemed to originate from a private information technology and security firm (IP address: 209.59.96.11) with offices in the UK and California. I also forwarded him several copies of sexist and degrading emails I had received at my Warwick University email address writing that these were ‘just a snippet of more than 1000 spam emails she had received’. In his reply to me on 24 June 2019 at 12.57 pm, Sir David Normington wrote that ‘he could not see how that email could be interpreted in any way as a threat of physical harm to you and that he did not intend to correspond with her on such matters’. On 6 November 2019, I wrote to Professor Andrew Sanders, Head of Warwick Law School, requesting him to investigate why I had been bombarded with 130 spam emails, phishing emails and emails containing malware within a few months and why Warwick University’s IT security and Helpdesk offices who had received copies of them, including the email headers, were failing to act. Professor Sanders not only remained indifferent but also wrote to Warwick Law School’s Director of Administration as follows:

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‘The message below from Dora says that she gets a lot of spam etc. I expect it is because she doesn’t allow anyone to update her PC. Could we put our heads together on a response on those lines pse –A’  

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Biography

Theodora (Dora) Kostakopoulou, LLB (Hons) (Athens), M.A., Ph.D (Government, Essex)

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Dora Kostakopoulou is a visiting Professor of European Union Law, European Integration and Public Policy at KU Leuven and was the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Fundamental Rights Agency of the EU (June 2020 – June 2023). In 2020/21 she was a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the University of Amsterdam. Formerly, she was Jean Monnet Professor in European Law and European Integration and Co-director of the Institute of Law, Economy and Global Governance at the University of Manchester where she spent 12 years (until 2011). Her research projects have been funded by the European Commission, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, NORFACE, UACES and the Modern Law Review. Dora joined the AHRC’s Peer Review College in 2009 and has been a reviewer for the ESRC, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in Social Sciences, the Veni Scheme, the Austrian Science Fund (START Programme), the Estonian Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Research Foundation Flanders, the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation, the International Research Foundation, the Academy of Finland and the European Commission (Horizon 2020). She has been British Academy, Thank Offering to Britain Fellow (2003-2004) and recipient of an Innovation Award by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2004-2005). She is the author of Citizenship, Identity and Immigration in the European Union: Between Past and Future (2001, Manchester University Press), The Future Governance of Citizenship which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008 (Law in Context Series) and Institutional Constructivism in Social Sciences and Law; Frames of Mind, Patterns of Change (2018, Cambridge University Press). She has co-edited A Redefinition of Belonging? Language and Integration Tests in Europe (2010, Martinus Nijhoff),The Reconceptualisation of European Union Citizenship (2014, Martinus Nijhoff) and The Human Face of the European Union: Is EU Law and Policy Humane Enough? (2016, Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on a monograph on migration law and policy in the European Union (under contract, Cambridge University Press).

Her articles have appeared in the European Law Review, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Columbia Journal of European Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, European Law Journal, Journal of Common Market Studies, Political Studies, European Political Science, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, European Journal of Migration and Law, European Security, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, International Journal of Law in Context and the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Her research interests include European Public Law, Free Movement of Persons and European Union Citizenship, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, Migration Law and Politics, Citizenship, Multiculturalism and Integration, Democracy and Legitimacy in the EU, Law and Global Governance, Political Theory and Constructivism, and, fairly recently, Equality Law.