Border management has shifted: from an avowed focus on international protection standards into pure containment and deterrence. Within this approach, every attempt at humanitarian assistance is systematically framed by state authorities as criminal facilitation of migration and human smuggling.
Critical to this strategy is the criminalization of NGOs and solidarity movements that document border practices. By prosecuting civil society actors, the state seeks to eliminate critical witnesses to pushbacks and fundamental rights abuses. This framing is directly tied to the physical and administrative architecture of migration management established across Greece and the EU. Over recent years, reception facilities have been replaced by high-security camps, situated in isolated areas. When this dehumanising logic takes root within legal institutions and public discourse, the state’s obligation to provide rescue and international protection is deprioritised by the approach of national defense. Consequently, pushbacks and drownings are no longer viewed primarily as illegal practices. Instead, they are interpreted as the logical and acceptable consequences of enforcing border sovereignty.
The prosecution of Tommy Olsen, founder of the Norwegian NGO Aegean Boat Report (ABR), and Panayiotis Dimitras, spokesperson of the Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM), illustrates the systematic use of judicial persecution to shut down independent border documentation. ABR operates as an independent monitor, collecting data on sea arrivals, distress signals, and pushbacks in the Aegean Sea. GHM has engaged in formal reporting, regularly submitting filings to judicial authorities and international bodies to document human rights violations.
The formal charges against Olsen and Dimitras come from a single incident on 13 July 2021. A small vessel carrying eight asylum seekers arrived on a Greek island. To avoid being pushed back to sea – and to exercise their right to seek international protection – the group contacted GHM and ABR. Olsen and Dimitras verified the group’s presence and location, as well as details of their identities, and transmitted a legal distress notification directly to the Greek Coast Guard, police authorities, and international bodies. In response, the state filed charges for alleged participation in a criminal organization to facilitate the illegal entry of foreign nationals for profit. To secure Olsen’s custody, Greek authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant. On 11 March 2026, Norwegian police arrested Olsen at his home. However, on 15 May 2026, the Norway Court of Appeal unanimously rejected Greece’s surrender request. Despite this ruling, the Greek warrant remains active, preventing Olsen from traveling to Greece and requiring him to be tried in absentia to avoid up to 18 months of pre-trial detention. In Greece, Dimitras was subjected to severe pre-trial restrictions. These included a ban on leaving the country, a prohibition on carrying out any GHM activities, an obligation to report regularly to a police station, and €10,000 bail.
The trial of Olsen, Dimitras, and two Cameroonian asylum seekers, also accused of facilitating illegal entry, was set to open on 6 October 2026, before the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of the Dodecanese, on the island of Rhodes. At the opening hearing, where Olsen was represented in absentia, the court postponed proceedings until 6 April 2027, because the counsel for Dimitras was unable to attend. The court failed to address the defence lawyer’s request for the translation of the indictment.
The continued weaponisation of anti-smuggling law against human rights monitors serves a specific purpose: to prevent civil society from recording border enforcement practices. International institutions and human rights bodies have repeatedly condemned this judicial approach.
This is not a new approach, there have been multiple civil society actors criminalised under charges of facilitation of migration, and although until now all of them have been acquitted, it took years until the trials took place, decreasing the capacity of the people accused and the organisations that they are part off, to continue their work in solidarity with people on the move.
The laws against smuggling have become one of the main tools of this border management, targeting not only civil society actors but people on the move themselves, imprisoning them with life sentences, with a double goal. First, these laws reinforce the narrative of migrants as criminals, dehumanising them further. At the same time – together with pushbacks, violence at sea, and the situation in the detention camps – they are used as a deterrence method in themselves. The criminalisation of civil society is another piece of a border regime that sustains itself through a dehumanising narrative. It cannot be achieved if witnesses speak out.
