As I write this week’s bulletin, a friend is standing trial at Mytilene court in Lesvos, alongside twenty-three others who worked in Search and Rescue on the island’s shores. Arrested in 2018, they were accused of “facilitating the illegal entry” of migrants and of “espionage”, among other charges. For seven years they have lived under the threat of imprisonment.
The trial is still ongoing. I can’t yet share an outcome, or report on the shambolic case that has brought them to this point. Nor do I know whether the judges will respond fairly to the evidence before them. Instead, I’ll try to describe what has happened in the shadow of these charges.
In 2015 – the “long summer of migration”, as it came to be known – most Search and Rescue efforts on Lesvos were run by local people. As Europe’s “refugee crisis” became headline news, funding flowed, international NGOs set up operations, and other self-organized groups worked quietly at the shoreline, refusing big money or the media spectacle. Whatever their approach, everyone worked openly and in co-operation with the authorities: there could have been no effective response without it.
Then, in August 2018, police arrested two volunteers with ERCI, an emergency-response organization. More accusations followed, and more people found themselves pulled into the case. “Among these unidentified accused,” my friend wrote, “I found myself.”
A few years later they reflected on the charges: “The presence of NGOs and independent groups saved many lives … people were in urgent need of assistance to prevent deaths near or on the shore.” Yet the authorities chose instead to depict them as human traffickers. As CPT has said for years, these prosecutions are one more tool in Fortress Europe’s arsenal – usually deployed against migrants themselves, who are handed enormous prison sentences for the “crime” of seeking safety. Charges like these have led to the mass incarceration of migrant men in Greek prisons, trial after trial giving free rein to the paranoid imagination of policymakers, prosecutors and judges.
Unable or unwilling to believe that anyone would travel to Greece simply to help others, the police imagined a criminal network instead. NGOs eventually withdrew from the shoreline, leaving only self-organised groups to carry on. They faced constant harassment by police and eventually intimidation from a violent masked mob.
Shifting Coast Guard and police policies made their work impossible. The Coast Guard began systematically pushing people back out to sea, or locking people up before they could claim asylum. With limited resources, rescues were too dangerous to undertake alone – but “nobody could make themselves complicit in these practices.”
In effect, these charges helped to clear potential witnesses from the scene of a crime. Independent Search and Rescue in Lesvos came to an end.
CPT will be present to monitor the trial, to stand in solidarity with our friends, alongside many others. This time, the case has drawn significant media attention and independent scrutiny to the court. Their presence carries a simple message: if solidarity is a crime, we too are complicit.
