Ministry counts 37 applicants to head central prison

Some 37 applications have been received for the position of head of the central prison, following the suspended of former prison director Anna Aristotelous, local news media reported on Friday.

According to Philenews, the public service commission has received 37 applications since the position was first published at the end of January and the closing of the submission period on February 20.

The position falls within the categories of governmental positions that legally require an evaluation according to the public service laws of 2022 to 2025 and ranks as a combined A15 and A16 – the latter being the highest scale on the public service salary scales.

The A15 scale provides for an average hourly gross wage of €40.5, ranging from annual gross earnings of €71,491 to up to €86,505, while the A16, at an average hourly rate of €44.83, can reach up to €96,429 gross annual wage.

Candidates must undergo an assessment at examination centres based on a procedure decided by the public service commission.

Those who succeed will then be invited to an oral interview, after which the most suitable candidate will be selected.

The call for applications follows a decision by the justice ministry, which, as the authority in charge of prisons, ruled that the appointment of directors and deputy directors should be independent of other services.

Aristotelous worked as a senior officer for the justice ministry before being appointed acting director of prisons in 2014 and head of the Cyprus prisons department in 2016.

She and the central prison’s senior officer Athina Demetriou had asked to be transferred from their positions in 2022, just one day after the deputy attorney general announced an investigation into the prison after classified state documents were found in the residence of the prisons’ chief warden.

Aristotelous and Demetriou had requested to be removed from their positions once the two inquiries were concluded, irrespective of their results.

Their appeal led attorney-general George Savvides to restate that the Legal Services Act exclusively serves the public interest, regardless of whether people agree or disagree with its actions.

Aristotelous had in June 2025 been suspended from her later posting as acting permanent secretary of the defence ministry by the cabinet.

Following the cabinet’s announcement, her lawyer Christos Triantafyllides said that the authorities were using her as a “scapegoat”– a position that has been maintained until today.

In addition to the freshly opened call for applications for the prison director’s role, currently held in an acting capacity by Maria Siali, another 90 new prison guard positions have been created to address the increased demand at the prison.

With an occupancy rate of 226.2 per cent, meaning it had a population of around 1,164 inmates, Cyprus has one of the most overcrowded prisons in Europe.

The persisting conditions prompted the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture to warn of “serious problems” at the facility, stressing that it had “grave concerns” over “the high levels of inter-prisoner violence” in a report issued in December 2025.

In an attempt to combat this, a total of 164 foreign nationals were deported from detention centres and the central prison in Cyprus between December 10 and January 20.