Refugee aid workers face years in prison as trial starts in Greece

Activists gathered outside a courthouse on the island of Lesbos, Greece, on Tuesday holding a banner declaring “Saving Lives is Not a Crime.” Just inside, a long-awaited trial got underway in which 24 humanitarian aid workers and volunteers face serious charges and lengthy prison sentences for their shoreline response work helping refugees at sea. Among the defendants are Seán Binder, a German-born Irish rescue diver, and Sarah Mardini, a Syrian refugee-turned-aid worker whose life inspired the Netflix film “The Swimmers.” Human rights groups have decried the case as “farcical” and say it “perversely misrepresents the group’s search-and-rescue operations as a smuggling crime ring.” All the defendants maintain their innocence. “If I go to jail, I’ll be very sad for myself. But it’s far more frightening in the general context,” Binder told reporters on the courthouse steps Tuesday. “Because if I can go to jail for handing out bottles of water, then you can go to jail for handing out bottles of water. What is at trial today is human rights.” Many of those on trial worked for the Greek NGO Emergency Response Centre International, or ERCI, between 2016 and 2018. ERCI monitored the Lesbos shore for rubber boats filled with refugees arriving from nearby Turkey. Its volunteers and staff communicated with Greek authorities and provided emergency support to boats in distress and those arriving ashore. In 2018, several members of the ERCI team were arrested, including volunteers Binder and Mardini, the group’s then-field director Nassos Karakitsos, and founder Panos Moraitis. The four were held in pre-trial detention for over 100 days before they were released. They have been waiting for the trial to begin for over four years. The trial covers the misdemeanor charges of illegal use of radio frequencies, forgery, and espionage. A separate investigation is underway involving the felony charges of migrant smuggling, forming a criminal organization, money laundering, and fraud. The 24 defendants face various combinations of charges, the most serious of which carry more than 20 years imprisonment. The trial was previously set to begin in November 2021 but was adjourned on procedural grounds because the court did not have jurisdiction over one of the defendants. A high-profile trial This trial is one of dozens of cases across Europe in recent years where NGO workers and volunteers have been prosecuted for providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and asylum seekers. However, this case has reached a high profile, particularly with the release of the Netflix film in November. It shows how Mardini and her sister Yusra, both competitive swimmers, fled the Syrian war, then jumped into the sea during their journey across the Aegean and pushed their sinking dinghy to the shores of Lesbos, saving the lives of everyone on board. On the island where she arrived as a refugee and returned as a volunteer to help others, Mardini now faces criminal charges. Zacharias Kesses, the lawyer for Mardini and Binder, told Devex that all of the charges are “baseless,” but that the case has already had a chilling effect on humanitarian work in Greece. “What I see in Mytilini is a pattern. A pattern of criminalizing humanitarian aid and assistance by renaming any activity as facilitation [of migrant smuggling],” he said, referring to the capital city of Lesbos. “And in the meantime, all the individuals, all the volunteers, and organizations leave the island and there is a success story that can be presented by the police.” Anna Benedictsson, a lawyer from Sweden and former ERCI volunteer who was not charged but came to Lesbos to support the defendants Tuesday, said she felt the chilling effect in the months after the arrests. “Just taking runs I remember thinking like, what if a boat arrives during my run? How do I prove I’m not running to the boat, just out for a jog?” she said. “It’s a very bizarre situation.” Criminalizing aid work ERCI stopped operations in 2018 when its aid workers were arrested. In 2021 Greece passed legislation that made it almost impossible for NGOs to adhere to registration requirements. There have been several other trials in the country involving NGOs providing aid to refugees on Lesbos and beyond. There are currently no civil search-and-rescue organizations operating on Lesbos. The Eastern Mediterranean crossing is deadly — according to the International Organization for Migration, 376 people died or went missing along the route in 2022. Greek authorities and the European Union have been criticized for making the route even more dangerous with illegal pushbacks of migrants to Turkey. Greece denies engaging in pushbacks, despite mounting evidence from journalists and human rights researchers. “The criminalization of humanitarian workers serves no one,” said Grace O’Sullivan, an Irish member of the European Parliament present at the Lesbos courthouse Tuesday to support the defendants. Glykeria Arapi, the director of Amnesty Greece, called the case “an emblematic case of criminalization of solidarity.” “It has been happening in different cases and also in different countries aside from Greece. We have examples in Switzerland, we have cases in Italy, in France, in Croatia, in Malta,” she said Tuesday. “So people who support people in need — they are being intimidated, they are being prosecuted.” A study commissioned by the European Parliament in 2021 found at least 60 cases of formal criminalization of humanitarian assistance provided to migrants between 2015 and 2019, mostly in Italy and Greece. An openDemocracy investigation put the total at 250 people who were arrested, charged, or investigated for their work supporting migrants in the same time period. Over half of the NGO search-and-rescue ships that served in the Mediterranean in that period faced administrative and criminal investigations and were unable to sail, according to the European Parliament study. Particularly well-known is the Italian case of the Iuventa, whose workers face up to 20 years in prison for smuggling charges similar to those faced by Karakitsos, Mardini, and Binder. Karakitsos said he is troubled with the way authorities have responded to his case. “It appears this is something that Greece and the EU in general accepts — to be accused of a crime because you are helping other people,” he said. “Was the problem that the other people were from the Middle East or from Africa? Or because they were brown or Black? Or because they were Muslim? Because if yes, there is a huge problem in Europe.”