The NGO worker on trial for people-smuggling in Lesbos

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the humanitarian worker on trial for people smuggling in Lesbos.

0:24so it began like any other night while i was volunteering which is that i had just finished some dinner with the team and it was my turn to be on something called the spotting shift And so five minutes to 11, I get into the organization's Jeep. I drive down to the shoreline with my colleague, another volunteer, and we get out of the car. We set up two camping chairs. We have our cup of tea in our thermos and we sit down and we just wait. We watch and we listen. It's 2018 and 23-year-old Sean Binder has left his comfortable life in London and moved to the Greek island of Lesbos to work for a local search and rescue charity.

1:13It's not quite the peak of the migration crisis, but there are still many boats packed full of people attempting to make the dangerous crossing to Greece every night. And on this night, he was spotting, that is, standing on the beach with a pair of binoculars, watching out for dinghies of refugees making the journey from Turkey. We stand here just listening, and were listening for screams or for shouting or for boat engine sounds. Anything that would indicate that somewhere in this inky blackness between Lesbos and Turkey is a boat in distress. And nothing particularly special happens until about 3 a.m.

1:52when the police arrive.

1:58Then another police car arrived and then another police van arrived. And so there was a convoy of three police cars around 2 a.m. And they walked around our jeep poking and prodding at it. And then they suggested that there was something amiss and that we would need to come in for questioning. That we would need to go in to the police station.

2:28At this point, Sean has no idea that this is the start of a seven-year ordeal. One that will see him dragged through the Greek criminal justice system and branded a spy and a smuggler, as he and 23 other humanitarian workers face a string of criminal charges as a result of their work with refugees. Next week, the case will finally come to court, and Sean will learn his fate.

3:01These are some of the most serious crimes against a state you can commit. And they really are serious, I mean that. For every one individual you're accused of facilitating the entry for, you face 10 years in prison. And the indictment that we have suggests that we've helped hundreds of people. I mean, I face a sentence, just doing the math, of thousands of years. Right groups have called the charges baseless and said they've led to a climate of hostility against humanitarian workers in Greece. But maybe that's the point. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Why is Greece charging humanitarian workers with some of the most serious crimes?

3:46Sean, when did you decide that you wanted to travel to Greece to work with refugees and asylum seekers? It was in 2017. I had just finished my master's degree here at the LSE. And I specialised in European defence and security policy. And that was just around the peak, as you'll know, of the so-called migration crisis. The number of migrants and refugees landing on Greek shores has risen sharply. About 12 people a day who are dying, trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. So this is obviously a very, very big crisis now. We have one boat on the horizon there. Another boat full of refugees and migrants over there.

4:27I'm a Syrian student. And I came here because it was so dangerous. The bombs are everywhere. It was when I realized, I think, that the way that the European Union responds to people drowning in our ocean is by securing and defending against them, by in effect abandoning our obligations towards them. And I felt that this happening in my name was an outrage.

4:57Having had the knowledge based on my studies and having grown up in Ireland with few friends and lots of time near the ocean, I learned to surf and to scuba dive and I spent time on boats. So I felt I had some skills to do search and rescue. I had a couple of months, I had a bit of money and I thought, okay, I can go and volunteer. And had you ever done anything like this before? Was activism or actually going and shaping your life around trying to do something, responding to something that you'd seen in the news? Was that something that you'd done before? Not massively. I mean, I had volunteered to help the homeless in Dublin when I was doing my undergraduate degree.

5:32I had volunteered to assist folks with intellectual disabilities. We had organized pantomimes and fundraising events. But I wouldn't say that I was an activist. And why Lesbos? Well, it is one of the primary entry points for people seeking asylum. It is a tiny little island, but it is nestled right up against Turkey. So you can see the lights twinkling. You can see cars driving in Turkey. It's really quite close. And that's the first thing you notice, how close you are to the external border. And suddenly it becomes clear why people are crossing into Lesvos in order for people to claim asylum.

6:09Right. And you volunteered for a Greek organization called Emergency Response Center International. Why that group in particular? So I had done a bit of research into the kinds of organizations that are doing search and rescue. At this time, everyone and their grandmother was organizing a search and rescue operation on Lesvos. And I chose on a particular basis, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to join a Greek organization, and I wanted to join an organization that had a good relationship with the authorities. In a better world, the authorities would be doing this kind of search and rescue work, but we don't live in that better world.

6:45There's a real gap in service, and the authorities require the assistance of civilian organizations. So for example, we worked with the Coast Guard. We trained the police officers to do CPR because they couldn't do it before. And so there's a real need to cooperate with the authorities because they weren't always equipped to do this kind of work.

7:15I arrived on the island and I joined this small organization. there was three houses that were housing volunteers. We had, at the time, about 40 volunteers. We ran a medical facility in Moria Refugee Camp, which was one of the most infamous camps in Europe until it was raised to the ground several years ago. We also did search and rescue. And so most of my time was spent training, going out to sea, repeating search and rescue patterns, ensuring that we could practice lifting people into boats, responding to a particular kind of request, doing triage for patients. It's important to note, while we have these images of search and rescue organizations being these high-octane, very heroic operations, by and large, most of the time, I did very little.

8:07Mostly, I stood at the shoreline from midnight to 7am, just looking and listening. Who was it that you were working with? Can you describe some of your colleagues, friends that you were working very closely with? Yeah. What was so wonderful about volunteering, even for this small search and rescue NGO, is that there were so many people from all over the world who got involved and who cared about this issue. There were Coast Guard officers from the US Coast Guard who came to volunteer. There were so many NHS doctors and nurses who were in the medical facility in Moria day in, day out, people from all over the world.

8:49I always remember this one night, it was deep in winter, and we had what we would call a critical arrival situation. Four boats arrived in the space of about 30 minutes, and there was a storm, there was thunder and lightning, and it was just, as an organization coming together, splitting into four teams, addressing the triage on different points of the beach, you know, pulling people out of the water who need a particular kind of care, identifying them, creating this kind of makeshift shelter to keep the children out of the lashing cold rain. I was so bizarre. And because on the one hand, you are feeling so devastated that it is 20 something year olds who are forced to do this kind of work.

9:35I shouldn't be there. I'm not the right person to do that. On the other hand, to have 20-something-year-olds together doing this kind of work, I have never felt more proud to be part of a team than in that moment. I believe we literally danced in the rain afterwards. I mean, it was awful, and it was so terrible, but no one died that night. Everyone was taken to the hospital who needed to be. Everyone was safe in the end. That was a major achievement, and I felt so proud to be part of this wonderful team that night in particular.

10:14The first time Sean was taken into the police station came a few months into his time in Greece. He was questioned, he had all of his electronic devices confiscated and he was kept in a cell for a couple of nights. Then he was let go and he hoped that would be the end of it.

10:34we left those two nights in the coast guard jail thinking that's it we're going to go back to volunteer and that's exactly what we did so what was the moment that you realized that actually something very serious was going on it was about a month later so we were informed by some district judge that what would happen is now a formal investigation would be opened up against us. And in due course, we would find out what exactly that meant. But you had no idea what charges they were going to be bringing against you? Zip idea, zero knowledge. We understood absolutely nothing because they just refused to communicate with us.

11:09And so it really wasn't until much later that we suddenly realized this isn't just some routine investigation or some mistaken investigation, this is really mounting to something important. And that was in August of 2018. My co-accused, she was leaving Las Vos Island. She was leaving the island to continue her studies in Berlin. Yet when she was boarding her plane, the plainclothes police officer surrounded her on the tarmac and said to her, oh, by the way, just a couple more questions for you. We'll get you on the next plane home. Don't worry, just come with us. And of course, she complied. She was taken to the office and then they said, can you also call Sean?

12:00So I was then called and informed, okay, a few more questions for the both of us. Can you please come in? It must have been about 6 or 7 a.m. I was on the way for a shift in the medical clinic and I dropped everything. I went in and I sat down. We were both sitting there in the police office waiting for something to happen. And for hours, I think until midday, nothing happened. And I was saying, look, I have somewhere to be. I could be doing better work in the refugee camp where I'm supposed to be. I'm going to go unless you have any actual questions for me. And I got up. And the moment I got up, they said, you're going absolutely nowhere.

12:37And they said, put out your hands. And they handcuffed me and her together. And we were taken from that moment immediately to the local courthouse. And the courthouse, it all happened so quickly, they told us that you're being charged with very serious offenses and you will not be allowed to leave the island. And in fact, you're going to be held in pre-trial detention. And we were, from that point on, kept in prison. Until that moment, I thought we had volunteered with the Coast Guard. They know that we are not criminals. They know we've worked together. This is all going to fall away. And yet at that moment of being handcuffed.

13:17That all, of course, changed. Right, and what did they tell you that you were being charged with? So it's quite a mouthful. Being part of a criminal organization, money laundering, facilitating illegal entry, the illegal listening to radio frequencies, that doesn't roll off the tongue at all, forgery, fraud at the time as well, and my personal favorite one, of course, which is espionage or spying.

13:52Sean, can we just unpack what these charges actually mean? There was no dispute that you were working for this established local humanitarian organisation. But how did the work that you were doing with them lead to you being accused of such serious charges like facilitating illegal entry? What that means in this context is effectively smuggling. And what they say is that we weren't in fact a search and rescue organization. What we were actually doing is dragging people across the border. And then in order to be smugglers, we must be doing so for a profit motive. And we must be doing so having dragged them across the border without bringing them to the authorities to be processed.

14:32And what's so frustrating is that you can tell from the tracking data of the boat that we never crossed any border. The Coast Guard is aware of that. So it's clear that we never crossed that border into Turkey. It's clear from our communications that we didn't have any conversation with anyone in Turkey. There is evidence that we always call the authorities to inform them about in distress when we were going to assist, which means that we always did so with the authorities with us. And so this idea that we're these criminals is just completely unfounded. Right, so that's the illegal entry charge, but you were also charged with espionage, right?

15:09Yeah, they say I'm guilty of espionage for two reasons. One, that I listened to communications that were encrypted. The Coast Guard and the Navy speak on open maritime radio channels. Channel 16, anyone who's ever been on a boat will know that you're listening to Channel 16 no matter who you are, because that is where boat distress calls are communicated. And as a search rescue organization, of course we were listening to them. The second aspect of my supposed espionage was that I used encrypted communication services. What they're talking about is WhatsApp. It's nonsense. They say that we're money launderers because we had a GoFundMe page.

15:54They say this is evidence of how we were laundering money. That GoFundMe page was small donations from people around the world giving us money to put washing machines into a refugee camp for women and children where skin diseases were rampant. We have the receipts to prove that we purchased the machines. Nothing untoward happened. The accountant has records of all of it, not money laundering. And so there's this funny tension. On the one hand, I think, well, it's nonsense. I'm not a German spy and I can prove it. WhatsApp doesn't make me a spy. On the other hand, these are still very serious accusations.

16:29And if they can be leveled against me, then I'm not confident that I can't be found guilty of them, even though there's no evidence of any wrongdoing. I mean, you're being unbelievably calm, but this must have been so stressful. Yeah. And then we were immediately taken to a jail cell and we were split up. And I think what is so frightening is people, I think, assume that pre-trial detention is different from post-trial detention. That there's a place for people who are accused of a crime before their trial and then a place when they've actually been convicted where they go to. It's the same prison.

17:07So I remember being handcuffed to someone charged and found guilty of double homicide, for example. And being handcuffed to a man who had killed two people because I had done search and rescue felt incredibly demoralizing. Yeah.

17:32Katie Fallon, you're a reporter focusing on migration and refugees and you write regularly for The Guardian and you've also spent a lot of time on Lesbos over the last decade. So Lesbos has often been called the front line of the refugee crisis in Europe and some of the stats are quite mind-boggling. It's an island with a population of around 85 ,000, but in 2015 alone, nearly half a million people seeking asylum in Europe passed through. In the decades since, their number has significantly dropped, but this year it has still been a point of arrival for 5 ,000 people. How has this changed the island?

18:10Well, initially, when people first started arriving, the only thing people wanted to do was help. Lesvos has been a point of refuge for generations. Many of the people living there are descendants of refugees themselves who fled Turkey in the 20s. And so they felt a responsibility to help people. But as the years have passed and people have continued to arrive and there's been successive financial crises also in Greece, the mood has slightly changed. And that's not to say that people have all become hardened in some of these islands, but there's definitely been a change of mood. Right. So things are shifting among the people living on Lesbos.

18:53But what about politically? Has the Greek government's attitude towards asylum seekers also changed over the years? So I think initially there was a sense that people just should be helped. They were arriving in desperate conditions. But slowly over the years, that position has changed. at least politically. In 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was elected prime minister on a platform that was anti-migration, at least saying that they were going to clamp down a bit on arrivals, make it harder. And there's been ongoing reports since about 2020 of human rights violations happening at Greece's borders. A Greek coast guard vessel passes close to the overcrowded dinghy of migrants.

19:40Moments later, from another Greek flag boat, not clearly identified as Coast Guard, a man hits people with a pole. Women and children are visible on the dinghy. And that's to say that refugee boats were either being turned around in the sea, so prevented from arriving into Greek territory. And there were also very credible reports that people were being illegally deported from Greek islands and then abandoned at sea in life rafts. You, your government, has secretly expelled more than a thousand refugees, sailing people to the edge of Greek waters, abandoning them in unsafe life rafts, which, as you know, is illegal under both international and European law.

20:23Can you tell me, on the record, has this happened? No, it has not. Greece has every right, as every sovereign state, to defend its borders. So, there has been a very dramatic change in some ways, but it has been the accumulation of years and years of feeling often on the part of, I think, Greeks and definitely the Greek government that they had been left to deal with what they perceived as a big problem alone and that they were kind of the scapegoat of Europe because they were the southern borders of the European Union and other richer northern European countries were not doing their share and helping out the hundreds of thousands of people.

21:02who are arriving. Greece is also doing Europe a great service. Greece expects tangible solidarity from the European Union. But let's be honest, Europe has not been up to the task of dealing with a migration crisis. And what about this kind of hardening of attitude towards NGOs and the volunteers who are also there to help? When did that start? Initially, NGOs and locals and the the Coast Guard all worked together. But lots of people living on the islands aren't very well off. And they were seeing some of the NGOs who they perceived as being very well funded and getting a lot of money to do some of the rescue search and rescue activities they were doing.

21:46There was a sense that they were also part of the problem. And this was built into a narrative that they were part of the reason why people were coming and that it was a quote unquote pull factor. and that if NGO workers and volunteers were to leave, then the refugees wouldn't come in the numbers they were coming in. And that's been a narrative that's also been pushed by various different government ministers over the years who've said that NGOs are complicit in smuggling operations and have really doubled down in the sense that NGOs are also part of the problem as well. So, I mean, that opinion is definitely reinforced at a political level as well.

22:25So those days of volunteers and lifeguard, coast guard working side by side to get people to safety, that era is firmly over. Oh yeah, I think there's almost no NGO search and rescues left on any of the islands. There's still NGOs working in the camps and legal organisations working with refugees who've just arrived, asylum seekers who've just arrived, but there is almost no NGO presence at landings. By landings, I mean when people first arrive, when their dinghy hits the shore and they get out.

23:04Coming up, seven years after his arrest, Sean's court date finally arrives.

23:41So Sean, at the end of 2018, you were in pre-trial detention, or really just in prison, waiting for the trial. How long were you there for? Not particularly long, only three and a half months. I will say to you, if you're going to prison, do it on a Greek island. It is sunny, the food is great, the people are generally lovely. it actually genuinely wasn't the worst accommodation I've been in in Greece. But it wasn't great either. In fact, the UN condemned the prison that I was in. It was terrible. And so in the end, you and your colleague were released on bail and along with 22 other people, your trial date was scheduled for 2021.