LGreek justice on Friday canceled the procedure for “espionage” against 24 aid workers on the island of Lesbos, ending a controversial trial criticized by the UN and NGOs which denounce the criminalization of volunteers providing relief to immigrants.
The court of Mytilene, the capital of this Greek island in the Aegean Sea, said that it had taken this decision because of procedural flaws, in particular the lack of translation of the indictment intended for foreigners arrested. at issue in this case.
All are former volunteers who have helped migrants in Lesbos, one of the main entry points for refugees into Europe, which has seen hundreds of thousands of them flock to its shores since 2015, fleeing in particular from conflicts in Middle East.
A separate case targeting these aid workers for migrant smuggling, money laundering and fraud is still pending in Greece, however.
“This is not justice! Justice would have been a trial four years ago in which we would have been cleared (…) it is only a procedural error” which allows us to escape the justice in this part of the case, reacted Sean Binder, one of the main defendants, on the steps of the courthouse.
Among the other defendants is the young Syrian Sarah Mardini, who inspired with her Olympic swimmer sister Yusra a fiction broadcast on Netflix. Refugee in Berlin after an odyssey from Damascus to Germany in 2015 with her sister, she returned to Greece as a volunteer for the NGO ERCI.
Arrested in 2018, she spent three months in prison before being released on bail. She was not in court on Friday and was unable to attend the opening of the trial in November 2021 due to a ban on entering Greece.
worrying
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had previously asked the Greek courts to drop all charges against the aid workers.
“This kind of trial is really worrying because it criminalizes actions that save people’s lives and sets a dangerous precedent,” said Elizabeth Throssell, a spokeswoman for the High Commission, on Friday.
This trial was presented by the European Parliament as “the biggest case of criminalization of solidarity in Europe”. Amnesty International called it a “farce”.
After the verdict, the NGO called for the termination of all criminal proceedings still in progress and for which these humanitarian workers risk, according to it, 25 years in prison.
The court “recognized errors in a procedure which should never have taken place”, assured AFP Glykeria Arapi, the director of the Greek section of Amnesty, present on the spot.
The defendants had received the support of a number of human rights organizations but also of European deputies, having attended hearings or having displayed signs of support in front of the court.
“We were so lucky to have international support,” said Sean Binder. “This forced the prosecutor to at least recognize the errors made” in the procedure.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HWR) has further criticized the fact that the prosecution was initiated on the basis of police reports containing factual errors, “including claims that some of the defendants participated in rescue operations in dates on which they were not even in Greece”.
Hostile environment
In Strasbourg, the Council of Europe castigated the “hostile environment” in which human rights defenders in particular work in Greece, “a subject of concern for several years”.
“I urge the Greek authorities to ensure that human rights defenders can work in complete safety and freedom,” said the organization’s human rights commissioner, Dunja Mijatovic.
This procedure triggered in 2018 had led to most migrant rescue NGOs ceasing their activities at sea in Greece, a country also accused of practicing illegal pushbacks at its borders to neighboring Turkey.
01/13/2023 20:45:33 – Mytilene (Greece) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP