Activists celebrated victory in a Greek court last week as Irish volunteer Seán Binder, along with 23 other activists, were found not guilty of felony charges of people smuggling, belonging to a criminal organisation and money laundering.
The charges were leveled against individuals involved in providing humanitarian assistance and in search and rescue of refugees in Greece. Earlier misdemeanour charges, including espionage and disclosure of state secrets were dropped in 2023.
The case went on for almost eight years. During this time, the right to seek asylum has been steadily eroded both in Greece and throughout the EU and people who attempt to help refugees have been increasingly targeted by the authorities.
Seán Binder travelled to the Greek island of Lesbos in late 2017 to volunteer with the search-and-rescue NGO, the Emergency Response Centre. At that time, hundreds of volunteers were assisting refugees and other migrants arriving on the Greek islands, which had become one of the main entry points to Europe for people fleeing Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, as well as a key testing ground for EU efforts to restrict and deter migration.
The presence of volunteers and aid workers on the Greek islands developed in response to the events of 2015, when large numbers of people crossed the Aegean and thousands drowned at sea. They worked alongside the Greek Coast Guard in search and rescue efforts, assisting at sea as well as monitoring the shorelines with binoculars to spot boats and providing blankets, clothing, food, water, and medical assistance when people arrived.
The conditions in which Binder and his colleagues were operating in 2017 are now almost unrecognisable. The EU-Turkey deal, an agreement aimed at “stopping the flow” of asylum seekers entering the EU, came into force in 2016. Volunteers were still present on the shorelines where boats landed and to camps where asylum seekers were confined, but that access was beginning to narrow.
In the years that followed, restrictions intensified, aid organisations and other solidarity groups faced growing barriers to operating, including surveillance, harassment and threats of criminalisation. Much of the support for migrants seeking protection has since been dismantled and today, not a single civilian search and rescue operation remains in the Aegean.
Not only are there no longer volunteers on the shore, but asylum seekers who manage to reach the islands and surrounding territorial waters, are routinely forced back to Turkey, brought back out to sea, and abandoned to drift.
Asylum ‘Deterrence’ in Greece
The prosecution of Binder and his colleagues is rooted in a broader effort to deter racialised migrants from reaching Europe by withdrawing from search and rescue, blocking access to asylum and criminalising the act of seeking asylum itself. In Greece, this has frequently taken the form of prosecuting asylum seekers for ‘irregular’ journeys across borders that they are often forced to undertake in order to claim asylum.
In July, as arrivals from Libya to Crete increased, the Greek Parliament suspended the registration of asylum applications for three months for people arriving from North Africa. Among those arriving via Libya were Sudanese refugees, many of them minors or young adults. This group makes up a significant proportion of the thousands of people held in Greek prisons on charges of migrant “smuggling.”
Authorities have based these charges on identifying individuals as having steered boats or assisted drivers during the journey–often under duress, in conditions of distress, or simply because they could not afford the crossing otherwise. In 2023, people accused of “smuggling” made up 20% of the Greek prison population.
Flowing from this is the criminalisation of those who attempt to support asylum seekers. In 2020, the New Democracy-led Greek government introduced a new registry for non-governmental organisations with stringent conditions and broad discretion on the authorities to deny access not only to camps but to operate at all. More recently, in September 2025, the Minister of Migration and Asylum announced his intention to further tighten these rules, including through proposed measures to remove organisations from the registry if they are deemed to oppose the government’s migration policy.
Since 2020, there has been no civilian search and rescue or independent monitoring crews in the Aegean Sea. Mare Liberum, the last non-governmental organisation engaged in human rights monitoring at sea, dissolved in 2023, unable to continue its operations due to new Greek NGO laws and repression. Access to areas where refugee boats land are often restricted, and even lawyers have been blocked from accessing the shore when boats arrive.
These measures have served to remove potential witnesses to the real crimes being committed in the Aegean, allowing border violence to increase. Acting in collaboration with the European Border and Coast Guard agency, Frontex, Greek authorities have engaged in systematic pushbacks of asylum seekers, involving the often violent interception of boats carrying asylum seekers, towing them out of Greek waters and pushing them into Turkish waters.
These practices have led to mass drownings, most starkly in the Pylos shipwreck, where nearly 600 people lost their lives after the Greek Coast Guard took control of their boat and began towing it away from Greek waters.
Since 2020, these practices have expanded beyond interception at sea to include the abduction and forced expulsion of asylum seekers from Greek islands–sometimes even from within refugee camps. In a practice known as “drift-backs”, they are taken from land onto Greek Coast Guard Vessels, transferred into inflatable life rafts and abandoned to drift towards Türkiye.
EU Clampdown
These practices are enabled through the operational and financial support of the European Union, including Frontex, which operates alongside the Greek Coast Guard. In the Aegean, Frontex’s role centres on what it terms ‘sea surveillance’ and ‘early detection’: identifying boats and then transferring responsibility to the Greek Coast Guard. Frontex describes itself as the ‘eyes and ears’ at the border, justifying its presence as enhancing fundamental rights compliance, but in practice it has facilitated pushbacks while helping to insulate the agency itself and the Greek Coast Guard from legal accountability.
Within this context, charges of “facilitating illegal entry” like those brought against Binder have been used against those who report on the reality of border violence at sea. This includes not only search and rescue, but also monitoring organisations like Aegean Boat Report, who receive messages from asylum seekers crossing, track crossings remotely, and document human rights violations carried out by the Greek Coast Guard and Frontex.
These prosecutions form part of a broader pattern of criminalisation enabled by the EU Facilitation Directive, which introduced a common definition of migrant smuggling into EU law.
The Directive relies on an “overly broad definition of the ‘facilitation’ of entry, transit or stay,” and leaves states wide discretion over whether to exempt ‘humanitarian’ conduct from criminalisation. In practice, this has allowed states to criminalise any assistance deemed to enable the unauthorised entry or residence of “third-country nationals”.
The EU is now moving to expand this framework further, removing the requirement for smuggling to be linked to financial or material gain and introducing a new criminal offence of “public instigation” of illegal entry,, which could be used to criminalise people who provide information to migrants. This has already happened in Greece – the EU is again following suit.
Building the fight against border violence
The victory in the Greek court should be celebrated as a victory for basic human solidarity. It brings an end to a major legal battle that took a severe toll on those involved, whose lives were completely disrupted for almost eight years under the threat of prison sentences of up to twenty years.
At the same time, it is necessary to recognise how much the picture has changed in Greece and across the EU. As Binder said after the trial, “The only real outcome of all of this is that it has stopped people from engaging in search and rescue. It has been enough to scare them away from the shoreline, and that’s the point.”
The attack on search and rescue is only the tip of the iceberg. At every level, from legislation to border policing, the terrain has shifted. In this context, Binder’s own assertion on the steps of the court following the verdict, that, “We were always going to win”, is not so obvious.
On the same day that Seán Binder and his colleagues were acquitted, Ramzi, a 22-year-old Sudanese man, was reportedly sentenced to 10 years in prison for temporarily steering a boat that carried himself and his wife, after it got into distress and the driver needed help.
The Greek legal system has played an important role in this process, criminalising people seeking asylum while maintaining an environment of near-total impunity for those responsible for pushbacks. This is not confined to Greece. The incentives for such border violence are embedded in EU migration law itself, including the unequal distribution of enforcement responsibility placed on states at the EU’s external borders.
While there is some hope that Binder’s acquittal may serve as a precedent, the structural conditions that enabled his prosecution remain intact, and are being further entrenched. The EU Migration and Asylum Pact, due to be fully implemented in 2026, is set up to strengthen Fortress Europe, drawing on policies which, over the last decade, have transformed Greek islands into ‘open air prisons’ for migrants, and exporting them elsewhere across the EU.
The victory for Binder and his colleagues is significant in this climate of increasing hostility to migrants and those who support them. But so long as asylum seeking itself is being criminalised, we can expect more cases of this nature. And we cannot rely on the courts alone to shift the broader terrain.
The erosion of asylum also exposes the limits of the frameworks most often relied upon as a basis for solidarity with refugees. As Harsha Walia has described, the “liberal discourse of hospitality, benevolence and welcome,” offers little protection where access to asylum remains conditional on irregularised border crossings and on being recognised as a “deserving” migrant.
Search and rescue is defended as a legal obligation–the duty to render assistance at sea–yet in practice, when it comes to unwanted migrants, its scope has been progressively narrowed. Frontex’s operational approach and institutional interpretations have contributed to this by limiting when situations at sea are treated as “distress,” reducing the circumstances in which rescue is triggered where it might otherwise enable unauthorised arrivals. At the same time, the language of “saving lives” has been increasingly appropriated by EU migration management policy in order to legitimise measures that restrict movement and prevent access to protection.
Binder’s mantra: “if you see someone was lying on the roadside, would you check their pulse or their passport”, captures a basic human instinct of solidarity. But such instincts cannot be sustained in a system organised around deterrence and racialised exclusion. If we are to build on this sentiment, and on the belated legal victory, we need to recognise how capitalist institutions, from legal institutions, to border security, are being built precisely to crush these instincts. We need to build movements of solidarity in our communities, in the streets, that can organise against Europe’s violent border regime and the racialised violence it creates.
