“Saving lives is not a crime”, “Death of European values”. In front of the court on the Greek island of Lesvos, dozens of human rights activists holding placards followed with anguish the opening of the trial, Thursday, November 18, of 24 aid workers who took part in migrant rescue operations in the Aegean Sea. Tried among other things for “espionage” and aid in “illegal immigration”, the activists risk from eight to twenty-five years in prison for the most serious acts (“participation in a criminal network” of smugglers, “money laundering”). money ‘) which are still at the investigation stage three years after the start of the procedure.
The conviction for minor offenses will also have to wait, the Lesbos court having decided to refer the judgment to the court of appeal without giving a date of resumption, due to various procedural flaws (a page missing in the police report, not translation of documents, presence of a lawyer among the accused…). Sean Binder, Irish citizen of German origin, is angry with journalists, banned from entering the court: “We will still have to wait months for justice to be done and in the meantime the criminalization of humanitarians continues. “
Between 2016 and 2018, the 27-year-old law student was one of these young people, who came from all over Europe to lend a hand to refugees on the Greek islands, moved by the images of the 2015 migration crisis. Among the 24 defendants also include Sarah Mardini, a Syrian refugee who landed in Lesbos in 2015. For more than three hours, she and her sister, Yusra, pulled the 18-passenger boat they were in to the Greek shore to avoid a shipwreck. Yusra will compete in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics with the Refugee Swim Team. In 2016, Sarah, who obtained her asylum in Germany, decided to return to Lesvos and help migrants with the NGO Emergency Response Center International (ERCI). The story even inspired Netflix, which plans to release a fiction in 2022 about the two heroic swimmers.
An attempt at intimidation
But, in August 2018, when Sarah had to fly to Berlin to resume her studies at Bard College, she was arrested by Greek police and transferred to the high security prison of Korydallos, near Athens. A few hours later, it will be Sean’s turn to be held in the prison on the island of Chios, in a tiny, overcrowded cell. According to an 86-page police report, they are accused in particular of “espionage”, for listening to the radios of the Greek coast guard and the European border control agency Frontex, for having communicated by WhatsApp with refugees to facilitate their passage from Turkey to Greece, for having used false military license plates to access areas reserved for the army… Released on bail after three months, the two volunteers claim to have been deeply traumatized: Sarah says she left university and suffers from anxiety, Sean says to be “Terrified” at the idea of going back to prison. Sarah was unable to attend her trial due to a court ban on returning to Greece.
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