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Dozens of aid workers are on trial in Greece on migrant smuggling charges, in what human rights organizations have condemned as an attempt to criminalize aid for refugees.
The crackdown on the island of Lesbos comes as EU countries including Greece – which experienced the arrival of more than a million people during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis – increasingly tightened migration policies amid the rise of right-wing political parties across the bloc.
24 defendants affiliated with the Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), a non-profit search and rescue group that operated in Lesbos from 2016 to 2018, faced several years in prison. Felony charges include joining a criminal group facilitating the illegal entry of immigrants and money laundering associated with the group’s funding.
Among them are Sarah Mardini, one of two Syrian sisters who rescued refugees by dragging their sinking boat to shore in 2015 and whose story inspired the popular 2022 Netflix film The Swimmers, and Sean Binder, a German citizen who began volunteering for ERCI in 2017.
He was arrested in 2018 and spent more than 100 days in pre-trial detention before being released pending trial. “The outcome of the trial will define whether humanitarian aid will be judicially protected from absurd charges or whether it will be abandoned to a whirlpool of arbitrary narratives by prosecuting authorities,” defense lawyer Zacharias Kesses told Reuters.
Greece has toughened its stance on migrants. Since 2019, the centre-right government has strengthened border controls with fences and maritime patrols and in July it temporarily suspended the processing of asylum applications for migrants arriving from North Africa.
Anyone caught helping migrants ashore could face charges including facilitating illegal entry into Greece or helping a criminal enterprise under a 2021 law passed today as part of Europe’s efforts to combat mass migration from the Middle East and Asia. In 2023, a Greek court dropped espionage charges against the defendants.
Human rights groups have criticized the case, calling it baseless and lacking evidence. “The case rests on deeply flawed logic,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement. “Saving lives at sea is misrepresented as migrant smuggling, so the search-and-rescue group is a criminal organization, and therefore, the group’s legitimate fundraising is money laundering.”