Greece: Rescuers on trial

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:37Thanks for downloading the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Tim Hewell with Assignment, Rescuers on Trial. I'm standing on a pebbly Greek beach with a young man called Sean. So this point here, we're looking out here, is the Strait of Mittellini. I mean, we used to park our car right here and we would stand here, two people like you and I are now from midnight to about 7am. Looking out over there, which is mainland Turkey, it would be dark, you would see lights twinkling in the distance, and you just stand here listening to the waves and trying to hear small boat engine sounds or maybe even some screaming because that is the only way that you might know there's a boat in distress somewhere in these miles of water.

1:26I'm Sean Binder. I am German by birth, but I grew up in Ireland on the southwest coast in County Kerry. I grew up right by the ocean and so spent a lot of time surfing. And then I learned to become a rescue scuba diver. And I just love the ocean. During the so-called migration crisis, I decided to go and volunteer in civilian search and rescue because I didn't want people to drown. The organisation I volunteered with claims to have saved 55 ,000 lives. It was 2017. On the Greek island of Lesbos, thousands, mainly Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians, were braving this strait to seek asylum in Europe. If you identify a boat in distress, we'd call the team and they would all hurtle down here in vans.

2:21We had a medical team and we'd help disembark people, identify their needs. But in February of 2018, I was standing right here when the police arrived. They took us in for questioning and in August, we were told that we were being charged with being part of a criminal organisation. There were other charges too against Sean and 23 other volunteer rescuers. Some were eventually dropped in what's been a tortuous legal process. You were 24 when you were arrested, and now you're...? Now I'm the ripe old age of 31, having spent the past seven years in limbo. I'm trained as a lawyer, I'm a pupil barrister, I am not allowed to represent my clients until I'm eventually acquitted.

3:13But last month, Sean and his co-defendants were back on Lesbos to be tried finally on the criminal organisation charge and for alleged money laundering and facilitating the illegal entry of foreigners into Greece.

3:31Silence, please. All witnesses, leave the room till you're called.

3:38If I'm found guilty, it'll be a sentence of 20 years. I have made my preparations trying to get some savings together so that I can give my mother some money to rent a flat if she wants to stay near the prison. This is Assignment with me, Tim Huell, telling the story of a case that's raised big questions for refugee policy everywhere. Can humanitarian help to migrants be a crime? The trial's just finished. I won't give away the verdict till the end if you don't know. Here's what Sean told me just before it started. This is a precedent-setting case. If I am guilty of smuggling because I helped someone not drown, then the next person who saved someone from drowning will be guilty of smuggling too.

4:23Recordings not allowed in the courtroom, but let me recreate the scene. There are high, echoey ceilings, whitewashed walls. At one end are three judges on a high bench, behind a glass screen. Above, Christ stares out from an icon. The defendants are seated below. Sean is in a three-piece suit. The others are more casually dressed. Among them are a retired Dutch pension fund manager and a former Greek sea captain. Best known is Sara Mardini, who herself arrived as a migrant from Syria and later starred with her sister Yusra in the film The Swimmers. The back of the room is packed with friends, relatives, journalists and campaigners.

5:08The extracts of the proceedings that follow are translations of notes, written down as accurately as possible, voiced by actors. First witness is Erasmia Rumana of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. We have to understand the context back then. In 2015, the refugee crisis, 60 % of those arriving in Europe came to this island, Lesbos, more than 3 ,000 people a day. The needs were so huge, they couldn't be met by the Greek authorities. If it hadn't been for other organisations and for volunteers, those needs wouldn't have been met.

5:50Many arrived at Scala Sycamineas, a tiny fishing village I visited before the trial. We're talking about 100, 110 boats per day. And with a local fisherman, Thanasis Marmarinos. Day! Like the whole shore was covered by black and orange. You couldn't even see the rocks. The black and the orange of the dinghies. You could look into the sea and watch like a line of boats arriving. From May to November 2015, we spent most of the time rescuing people instead of working. But what else could we do? By the time Sean arrived in 2017, migrant numbers were much lower. That's mainly because of a deal between the EU and Turkey, allowing many to be returned there.

6:44But local people were still feeding and clothing new arrivals. Old Greek grandmothers would, you know, race down from their little tavernas with baskets of food for people who'd arrived on their beaches. And it is specifically because of their solidarity that I wanted to join a Greek organisation. He joined an NGO called ERCI, Emergency Response Centre International. So did Peter Wittenberg, the former Dutch pension fund manager, now aged 77. I was a skipper at a small lifeboat. So at 11 o 'clock in the night we would go out about two or three miles out of the shore and then wait, just wait, listen for refugee boats.

7:33Those boats had no navigation lights. They were not easy to spot. It's grey on grey or black on black. We could smell them. You could smell them? Yes, because there was spilling a lot of fuel that came into the boat. There was also salty water into the boat. they were so, so afraid and so terrible. And that is a mixture, it's a toxic mixture. And you can smell it. It burns on your skin. The mixture of fuel and urine? Urine, fuel and salty water. What does that smell like?

8:19I can't tell you. Very sharp, very acrid. Yes, it's... I'll get tears in my eyes if I think about it.

8:33Between rescuing and facilitating, is there a fine line? It's a very clear distinction. It's not facilitating. We never knew when people would arrive. We never, ever took people from one country over the border into another country. We never took people on board of the lifeboat. What we did is guide them to a safe place to land not on the rocks. And only, the defendants say, with the knowledge of the authorities. This, above all, is what the case will turn on. The offences occurs when you pull someone across the border and then you hide them from the authorities. And so our starting point is the evidence of the Coast Guard who have said ERCI, the organisation, communicated and cooperated with us.

9:33But will they say that in court? Next witness, Lieutenant Stavros Gargarellis, Coast Guard Inspector. We had a very frequent collaboration with ERCI. Not daily, but frequent. Collaboration? What does that mean? Zacharias Kassess, for the defence, is brandishing a phone. Here's a screenshot. It's a WhatsApp message from defendant Nassos Karakitsos. This was sent to you on July 10th, 2017. Hello, we've heard there's a boat off Molybos, broken engine, taking on water. It gives the coordinates. You reply, good morning, Nassos. Thanks for telling me. So you didn't say, it's in Turkish waters. Why are you telling me?

10:21Or, how do you know? No, I didn't. Because you weren't interested. And it was the same pattern for three years. You never asked where he got the information. He'd already said it was from relatives of people on board. I trusted him. Then, after three years, the police arrive and say it was all illegal. Did you then ask Nassos to reveal his sources? No. My bosses knew what was happening, so we continued the cooperation. Because your priority was saving lives. Exactly. Just the answer the defence needed, and from a prosecution witness. us.

11:07Day one's over and Sean's relieved. The prosecution case is, I mean, not falling apart, but now having heard the ostensibly strongest witnesses against us, what they've basically said is either, I don't know what the organisation did, or if I do know, it cooperated with us. But crucially, we haven't heard yet from the police. Back in 2017, Sean says, they knew exactly what he was doing. Police had arrived almost every other night. In fact, we would often stood shoulder to shoulder talking about the weather, how things were going. And after Sean's arrest in early 2018, he was soon released and went back to rescuing people till he was arrested again later that year.

11:54I was held in pre-trial prison for about three months. It was awful. I was handcuffed while I was being transported to the formal prison to a man who had murdered two people, was convicted of it, and being treated in exactly the same way felt deeply demoralising. It's day two of the trial, and the first witness will be the man who put Sean in jail, Michalis Doulaveris, commander of the Lesbos Security Police. Before we go in, defence lawyer Kerses, you'll hear his real voice now, is worried. If he states that there were information about votes and those information were known to the defendants and they didn't reveal it to the police, we will have a problem.

12:44The police chief's tall and lean, with a buzz cut in jeans and a black leather jacket. He doesn't look like a man to tangle with. He describes what he found on Sean's and Sara Mardini's phones. They were sending information about migrants from Turkey. The times, locations and the state of the boats. They had sources that the Coast Guard and we and the police had no access to. Were they guiding the migrants? That was the judge. Of course. They wanted them to reach land. You said sources. As police, did you find where the information about boats came from? That was Zacharias Cassess for the defence.

13:25No, we searched but didn't find out. The defendants should tell us. Yeah, please understand. They don't have to prove anything. You have a case to prove. And the answer is that you didn't find the source of the information. But the defendants have stated many times that their sources were relatives who had already arrived in Greece, and emergency hotlines such as Alarm Phone. The commander's once swaggering shoulders are beginning to sag, and the defence is turning up the volume. Did you know about the 11 boats mentioned in the indictment? The Coast Guard knew. Frontex knew. That's the European Union Border Agency.

14:09They knew, but I didn't. Just say yes or no. No, I didn't know. You didn't know. An ironic smile from the defence. But what's the evidence that the defendants were in a criminal organisation? The commanders already said... We found they were using encrypted communication. But what did he mean? Well, they were in a WhatsApp group. WhatsApp says the messages are encrypted. The company itself says so. We aren't inventing anything. Are you in any WhatsApp groups? Of course. For work, in my family. So what's weird about a group of 445 people using the same tool? By the end of his evidence, the command is clutching a rail for support.

14:59But leaves us in, I think, a very strong position. The prosecution's concluded its case. So if it was so weak, why did they pursue it for seven years? Defence lawyer Kess says. If you ask me why the police is insisting, this is their perception about what is humanitarian aid and if the non-governmental organisations are a pull factor to migration, there is no evidence. There is nothing apart from narratives. You're listening to the documentary from Greece. America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

15:46I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:06I'm Tim Hewell and this is Assignment. The trial was being adjourned for another month. So what about those wider narratives? Sean realised their significance soon after he was arrested. One of the first thoughts I had is, I must be guilty of something. Because that was the only way that I could make sense of the fact that I was sitting in prison alongside murderers. And so I spent a lot of my three and a half months poring over books and policy papers and legal documents. Then I came across a document, and it refers to civilian search and rescue organizations being, quote, a pull factor. In a nutshell, the safer the water, the more smuggling happening through it.

16:54And suddenly it made sense why I was in prison. On Lesbos, I too wondered whether rescuers sometimes play into the smuggler's hands. Here's what Thanassis the fisherman told me about the traffickers' dinghies. The amount of gasoline that they had, it was only to reach the Greek territorial waters. It was not enough to reach the shore. So I asked Peter Wittenberg, the Dutch defendant, you're kind of helping them to come in to shore. Yes, I admit that. We helped them in a safe way. I mean, did that depend on whether they were drowning or not drowning? I mean, were you only helping people who were visibly in distress, or were you just helping anyone that you saw who was out at sea?

17:45If you see the boats they arrived with, then you should immediately come to the conclusion that when they left the Turkish coast, They were already in distress because the dinghies were flabby. The engines they had were too small for too many people on board. They couldn't maneuver. There was no skipper on board. So they were in distress by nature. So you're really saying that anyone who was crossing those straits in that kind of boat automatically deserved help? Automatically, yes. There's no doubt. But Sean's reading convinced him there's no proof that people cross because they expect to be helped.

18:35One long-term academic study of migration from Libya to Italy found no relationship between the presence of NGOs at sea and the number of asylum seekers setting out across the water. The pull factor is nothing more than a rhetorical device. It is not supported by any evidence. He believes, though, that because the trial was delayed so long, the Greek state has achieved its aim of curbing rescue work, regardless of the eventual verdict. We, the 24 defendants, who have been pushing for trial year after year, we suspect the reason that it has not been resolved is because the shadow of uncertainty, the possibility that we are guilty of these offences, means that others are scared away from doing the work that we were doing.

19:21Others, such as the international medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières. Yanis Anagnostou is its deputy project coordinator on Lesbos. Back in 2015, 2016, it was much easier. It was more space for humanitarian action. We were in the water having big dinghies where we were supporting arrivals in the water. It's not something we do right now. We don't do any search and rescue operations. A 2021 Greek law banned rescue operations by non-governmental organisations without explicit Coast Guard permission. But the Lesbos trial has made aid workers extra careful to avoid any suspicion of human smuggling.

19:59Médecins Sans Frontières now offers medical and mental health care, food and clothes, when arrivals have already contacted them via approved helplines, which also share information with the Greek authorities, and when they're already well away from the shore, as Yanis' boss, Jovanna Asenievich, explains. Normally we operate further from the beach because also people move from the beach. So 500 metres approximately from the beach is the closest point where we go. We respect the law and we try to offer our humanitarian medical services respecting and following the law exactly because we know there's so many aid workers being criminalised for offering humanitarian service.

20:41So as humanitarian workers, which way this trial goes? is will this really change things one way or the other? Whether it goes left or right, it's really going to have a significant impact on how we work. Some of their patients have survived shipwrecks in which dozens perished off Lesbos last year. Others say they were victims of attempted pushbacks, a practice that's illegal under international law. Our patients tell us horrible experiences of being hit by the Greek and the Turkish ghost guard. While they're on a boat. While they're in the sea, hit with like long sticks, pointy sticks, that actually they burst their dinghies and then they're given life rafts or they do very, very dangerous maneuvers around the boat.

21:25So people lose control of the dinghies, they tumble down. Horrible, horrible experiences. Also, people are so afraid and terrified of pushbacks that when they come to land, they often come late, late at night and they climb steep up the hills as furthest away from the sea as possible. Greece has consistently denied any pushbacks, despite considerable evidence from human rights organisations and investigative journalists. It says its coast guard rescued a quarter of a million people from the sea between 2015 and 2024. But Migration Minister Thanos Pleveris, who describes himself as a hardliner, is toughening policies towards asylum seekers, as he told the BBC last year.

22:11I want to be completely honest. We try to have a balance of respect for their rights, but also respect for the rights of the Greek people. It is clear that a country cannot accept such pressure from migration and not react. On Lesbos, the government's hoping to open a large new closed access reception centre for migrants in a remote forest, a plan opposed by many locals. 2015, when efforts to help migrants were so celebrated that two islanders were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize feels like a very long time ago. Effilatsudi has worked with refugees for 20 years. Back then, all the celebrities were coming to the island.

22:53The pop came, all the prime ministers, politicians. But after that, nothing happened. Everything was reversed after some years. Then the government, especially after 2019, they talk about catastrophe of the island, of a very bad time, the main narrative was like, oh, the refugees destroyed the island. So talking to the people, to the local people that supported the refugees back in 2015, we realized that they felt very proud, but then they stopped talking about this because they felt they didn't do enough. If you don't get the feedback that what you did was important, you stay with your pain and your frustration, and many people after that, they stopped getting involved because they were overwhelmed and they didn't know what to do with this experience.

23:47I think now it's OK. It's a memory. A good memory or a bad memory? A difficult memory. I'm with Panaiotis Christofas, mayor of the island's main town, Mitalini. It has a lot of good memories that our citizens helped all these people, But after many years, a lot of locals get tired about the situation. Because the city has about 30 ,000 people. There were 20 ,000 asylum seekers. It's too much. It was in Moria. The refugee camp a few miles away that's now closed. But they came here to walk, to live, to buy things. The proportion was too high. The hospital has doctors for 30 ,000 people. The whole system was working in a red level, in a high level.

24:39Now there are about 1 ,200 people, asylum seekers, everything's OK. The tourism sector pricing. So we are now good, in a good situation.

24:54Silence again. It's now mid-January, and suddenly, after all these years, they want to finish the trial in a day. A few defence statements and the prosecutions summing up. It was not proven that the defendants communicated with migrants to receive information about migration flows. The information did not reach the NGO earlier than it reached the Greek authorities. What? Defendants, journalists stare at one another in disbelief. This is the prosecutor who brought the case, remember, but he has no case left. ...donations and any illegal activity. I propose that the defendants be declared not guilty.

25:40One more hour to wait in the now buzzing corridor. What will the judge say? The court declares the defendants not guilty on all charges. And not just on the details, but it seems on some broader principles too. A communication group on the internet cannot be regarded as a criminal organisation. Waiting in order to rescue a human life cannot be considered facilitation.

26:12Outside, a triumphant group photo on the steps. Amazing job, guys. Now we go swimming. That's Sara Mardini, the swimmer. And with her in the melee of journalists and supporters is Sean. Sean, what's your main feeling? I would say it's a relief-anger cocktail. I am obviously very relieved that I'm not going back to prison, but I'm also very angry that it's taken this long to get here, Tim. I wonder if this just falls away as like a win for us, but no real structural change for a system that is clearly failing its human rights obligations. Because in practice, the police will still arrest people.

26:52They'll still make life difficult for organizations that are doing nothing more than putting into practice what they ought to be doing. And what does it mean for you? You can now be a qualified barrister. I can hopefully go back to practice. I can, you know, maybe one day start a family. I can live a life that I hope I can. But there are poppers going off and there is champagne flowing and I do feel I might go for that swim.

27:24It's dark already and at the bottom of the hill, the seas as black as it was all those years ago when Sean and the others watched for dinghies. No twinkling lights out there tonight, and it's chilly, but they're going in anyway.