Minos Kokkinakis

In 1938 he was the first Witness in Greece to be arrested for violating the law against proselytism which the government of dictator Ioannis Metaxas had just enacted under pressure from the Greek Orthodox Church.

In March 1986, when Kokkinakis and his wife Elissavet visited a home in Sitia on Crete, where they apparently tried to convert a woman whose husband was the cantor at a local Orthodox church.

The court declared the defendants had intruded "on the religious beliefs of Orthodox Christians ... by taking advantage of their inexperience, their low intellect and their naivete."

The Crete Court of Appeal later acquitted Elissavet but upheld her husband's conviction, although it reduced his prison sentence to three months.

The landmark judgement was frequently cited in similar cases of proselytism in Greece, leading to acquittals not just of Jehovah's Witnesses but of other non Orthodox Greeks as well such as Pentecostal Christians and Buddhists.