In Greece, saving refugee lives goes on trial

ATHENS — On the eve of a trial that could see him spend more than two decades behind bars for rescuing asylum-seekers and refugees at sea, Nassos Karakitsos said he had no regrets.  

Karakitsos, a 40-year-old Greek national, had spent most of his career as a maritime security officer working on merchant ships around the world. When the head of the firm he worked for started a search-and-rescue nonprofit organization in 2016 to help asylum-seekers and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, Karakitsos signed up for a 15-day volunteer stint.

That turned into another 15 days, then another, then another. Eventually Karakitsos began working for the group, Emergency Response Centre International, as a full-time field director and stayed on for two years. ERCI monitored the coastline for refugee and migrant boats arriving from Turkey and sent their coordinates to the Greek coast guard, then worked with Greek authorities to ensure their safe passage through an often-deadly crossing. ERCI’s dozens of volunteers also provided medical support inside a Lesbos refugee camp and informal education for refugee children, including swimming lessons.  

“I was very, very passionate about my job,” Karakitsos said Wednesday night, just hours before Thursday’s trial would begin in Lesbos. “I was among so many amazing people that changed me for good. And I helped so many people. It was the first time in my life where I knew I was doing the right thing.”

Now Karakitsos is a defendant in a high-profile case involving 24 aid workers who performed search-and-rescue work and provided assorted aid to asylum-seekers and refugees. Additional defendants are former ERCI volunteers Sarah Mardini, a 25-year-old Syrian competitive swimmer who arrived on Lesbos as a refugee in 2015 and returned to the island to help others, and Seán Binder, a 27-year-old trained rescue diver and law student who grew up in Ireland.

The case echoes others throughout Europe where volunteers, aid workers, and NGOs have been criminally prosecuted for a range of humanitarian and protest activities, from giving asylum-seekers and refugees food to rescuing people at sea and blocking deportation flights. The Lesbos case is among the largest such prosecutions in Europe.

“It does stand out because of a wider trend across Europe of the criminalization of solidarity,” said Giorgos Kosmopoulos, an Amnesty International campaigner who is in Lesbos this week to observe the trial. The group is calling for the charges to be dropped. “If someone is dying at sea, people are going to help. You do the right thing and what does that do? It makes you a criminal?”

Other instances have seen search-and-rescue vessels pushed out of commission due to cumbersome bureaucratic measures in Italy and barred from operating off the coast of Spain. In an earlier court case in Lesbos, five volunteers were charged with people smuggling. They were cleared in 2018. More cases in Greece are on the way.

The charges against the 24 defendants in the latest case are serious. They include a mix of misdemeanors and felonies: espionage, facilitating migrant smuggling, forgery, fraud, money laundering, and establishing and being part of a criminal organization. The espionage charges are based on their monitoring of coast guard and Frontex radio channels that are accessible by anyone with a VHF radio, as well as smartphone communications through WhatsApp.

The misdemeanors carry sentences up to eight years, while the felonies carry two decades. The trial will initially examine only the misdemeanors, which are running up against their statute of limitations.

“The felonies are still in the process of investigation,” said attorney Zacharias Kesses, who represents Binder and Mardini. “So we have this very, very strange situation where those people are going to be judged for the misdemeanors which are inevitably related with the felonies,” before the felonies are ready to present in court.

“It’s absurd,” he said, calling the charges “baseless.”

On Thursday, just as proceedings opened following a three-year wait, the court in Lesbos adjourned the trial and referred the case to a higher court. A new date has not been set.

Growing restrictions on NGOs in Greece

NGOs and human rights advocates tell Devex the case is emblematic of the growing restrictions on humanitarian aid work in Greece, the reluctant epicenter of a refugee crisis that saw more than 1 million people enter Europe in 2015. 

Though Greek citizens for years were lauded for caring for asylum-seekers and refugees, the national attitude toward them hardened over time — particularly after a 2016 deal between the European Union and Turkey resulted in tens of thousands of people effectively trapped on the Greek islands as their asylum claims were decided. NGOs became a target of right-wing criticism, as well as government efforts to sideline them.  

The Greek government, under center-right Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has introduced several regulations that make it nearly impossible for NGOs assisting asylum-seekers and refugees to operate since he came to power in 2019.  

Last year, the Greek government passed legislation that dramatically increased registration requirements for NGOs. It has been criticized by three United Nations special rapporteurs and a host of other legal experts. The requirements are so onerous that some groups could not comply, forcing them to pause or reduce their work. Others have simply shut down.

A confidentiality law passed last year criminalizes aid workers’ efforts to publicly share evidence of abuse and neglect inside refugee camps. And in September, another law was passed that severely restricts the work of NGOs operating at sea.  

“We have very serious concerns with respect to the respect of rule of law in Greece, because it’s getting out of control,” said Eva Cossé, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who is documenting Greece’s efforts to criminalize NGOs’ work. “That’s in combination with the fact that Greek society doesn’t know what’s going on because of efforts to silence the media.”

This week’s trial in Lesbos is also taking place as Greek authorities come under fire for growing evidence of “pushbacks” at the country’s land and sea borders — in which asylum-seekers and refugees are pushed back to international waters or Turkish territory, which is illegal under international law.

“We have all these reports of illegal pushbacks, and there are very few [independent] people present to verify and confirm what is happening,” Kosmopoulos said. “The message from the Greek authorities is ‘Don’t get in our way. Our authorities will do whatever we want.’”

Greek officials have for years denied the country performs illegal pushbacks. In a heated exchange with a Dutch journalist last week, Mitsotakis again dismissed the pushback claims and said his government’s migration policy is “tough but fair.”  

‘Judicial harassment’

In the Lesbos case, 18 of the 24 defendants were members of ERCI, a registered NGO that operated on the island from 2016 to 2018 and was mainly staffed by young volunteers. The rest of the defendants worked with other humanitarian groups.

Mardini and Binder had been working a routine boat-spotting shift one day in 2018 when Greek police questioned them about the license plates of ERCI’s Jeep. Authorities also confiscated their phones, where they found a WhatsApp group that had been set up by the UN Refugee Agency for the purpose of coordinating humanitarian groups on the island as boats of asylum-seekers and refugees arrived.

Some of the messages became the basis for the prosecution’s charges — even though the information being shared on WhatsApp was publicly available and known to port police, according to Kesses.

Mardini, Binder, and Karakitsos were soon arrested and spent more than 100 days in pre-trial detention. They and two other ERCI members were all released on the same day amid immense public pressure. The charges against the other defendants are believed to have stemmed from the WhatsApp messages.

Mardini, who lives in Germany, has been barred from reentering Greece and attending the trial.

In this case, Kesses said, Greek authorities have wielded “the weapon of judicial harassment” to deter humanitarian work. In a sense, he added, they have already achieved their goal, whatever the trial’s outcome. The charges led to ERCI’s rescue boats and equipment being confiscated, and its bank accounts being seized. The group was forced to stop operating.

“ERCI was one of the biggest [search-and-rescue] organizations with one of the most volunteers. They looked at ERCI and they decided to finish with this organization,” Kesses said. “They sent a very serious message to all the other, less organized organizations and NGOs.”

Now, no search-and-rescue group is able to fully operate on Lesbos because of the immense restrictions.

This week marks the first time Karakitsos has been on the island in the three years since his arrest.

After he was released from pre-trial detention in 2018, he joined the International Organization for Migration and began working with unaccompanied minors in Greece. After two years in which he worked with thousands of young asylum-seekers, he left IOM earlier this year to focus on the trial. He is prepared for it to last days or even months.  

Karakitsos said he is “optimistic,” though the stakes are high.

“I want to continue to be in the humanitarian sector,” he said. “And if I am sentenced to even one day, I won’t be able to work in the sector anymore. And if I am sentenced to 25 years, I would not be able to work anyway. I’ll get out of prison when I’m 65.”

“You connect with people deeply,” he continued, in reference to his work. “Do you know how many messages I’ve received this week? ‘Mr. Nassos, we are thinking of you. Mr. Nassos, we hope you are okay.’ These are kids from Afghanistan, African countries. They’ve had their lives destroyed and they’ve had to make a new life. Now they are checking on me.”

Update, Nov. 18, 2021: This article has been updated with news of the trial’s adjournment.