On December 4, the courthouse in Lesbos, Greece, began examining a smuggling case. On trial were twenty-four aid workers charged in connection with their work in 2016 and 2018 with Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI), a nongovernmental organization that had in that period conducted shoreline response in the waters off Lesbos. Aid workers have stated they offered blankets and water to people who had arrived on dinghies from Turkey and helped those who were at risk of drowning. They face up to twenty years in prison.
The charges have been decried as trumped-up and ludicrous by several human rights watchdogs and legal organizations. “These charges aim to portray those who help people on the move as criminals. And it’s part of a trend sweeping across Europe that’s criminalizing solidarity,” wrote Wies De Graeve, the executive director of Amnesty International Belgium’s Flemish branch.
But the criminalization of people on the move, and anyone who offers solidarity, has gone from a trend to the modus operandi in Greece and across Europe. This case is a stark example of how Europe’s response to asylum seekers has changed since 2016 — from people offering blankets on coastlines to criminalizing sea rescue and systematically pushing back those seeking safety.
The Lesbos case began with the arrest of Nassos Karakitsos, Seán Binder, and Sara Mardini in 2018. Karakitsos was the field director of ERCI, while Binder and Mardini worked on shore response. (Mardini herself arrived in Greece seeking asylum, and as the inflatable boat she was journeying on stalled out, she and her sister famously swam the dinghy to shore.)
Karakitsos, Binder, and Mardini were held in pretrial detention for over a hundred days. They, along with twenty-one others involved in the NGO, were hit with a laundry list of charges: forgery, espionage, facilitation of illegal entry, forming a criminal organization, money laundering, and fraud.
All the defendants maintain that their…
Auteur: Moira Lavelle
