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Emmanouil Billis was recently honoured by the German government which bestowed the Max Planck Society’s Otto Hahn Medal on him for this doctoral thesis on the “Role of the Judge in Adversarial and Inquisitorial Systems of Criminal Procedure. Theoretical Models, Evidentiary Proceedings in England and Germany, International Dimensions” [Die Rolle des Richters im adversatorischen und im inquisitorischen Beweisverfahren], published in 2015. The award ceremony took place in Weimar on 21 June at the Max Planck Society’s Annual Conference (Jahresversammlung).
It is one of the most important distinctions for young academics in all academic disciplines in Germany. Few Greeks have ever won the Otto Hahn Medal since 1978 when it was introduced (one was the leading mathematician Dimitrios Christodoulos back in 1981), and in general very few jurists –and criminologists in particular– have ever won the medal, irrespective of their nationality.
Moreover, the scholar was chosen among the other prize winners in the same academic discipline for the prestigious 2017 Otto Hahn Award. This distinction offers considerable support during the prize winner’s post-doctoral studies.
Emmanouil Billis studied law at the Democritus University of Thrace (2001-2005). He went on to do postgraduate studies in criminal law at the Law School of the Capodistrian and National University of Athens (2005-2008) and then at the University of Bonn (2009-2010) were he received a summa cum laude distinction for his dissertation on European criminal law provisions and human rights. He carried out doctoral research with a scholarship from the Onassis Foundation (2012-2014) at the Law School of the University of Freiburg into the role of judges in hearings and inquisitorial evidentiary proceedings.
He is a visiting researcher and lecturer at Queen Mary University, London. For the last 6 years, he has also been a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law. In the 2015-2017 period he undertook translation of the Greek penal code into English in collaboration with Vasiliki Chalkiadaki. The book entitled “The Greek Penal Code” published by Duncker & Humblot and the Max Planck Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law, includes a detailed introduction to Greek criminal law as well as a translation of the current Greek penal code into English, and is also the only modern academic work on this topic.
Since 2007 Emmanouil Billis has been a practising lawyer and member of the Athens Bar Association, and since 2015 has held the post of Substitute Lecturer at the Officers’ School of the Hellenic Police Academy.
