ON a cold night in February 2018, Sara Mardini and Seán Binder sat in a jeep on the rocky headlands of Lesbos, their eyes on the water.
As volunteers for Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI), a small humanitarian aid group, Mardini and Binder were looking for signs of incoming migrant boats so they could alert the Greek coast guard and search-and-rescue groups to dispatch assistance.
They made an unlikely pair: Binder is a soft-spoken Irishman with broad shoulders and a mop of black hair; Mardini is a Syrian refugee with a nose ring and a preference for leather jackets. However, they shared an easy camaraderie, bound by their playful energy and a fiercely serious devotion to their work.
Just a few years earlier, Lesbos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey, became the centre of the European migrant crisis, serving as the point of landfall for more than 500,000 of the approximately 1m asylum seekers who reached Europe by sea in 2015.
Now, even as the world’s attention had moved on, the crisis on Lesbos remained. Migrants continued to arrive, although in smaller numbers.
Most came expecting to pass through but instead they often found themselves stuck for months or years due to closed borders, tightened migration policies, and a creaking system for processing asylum claims.
An island once known for its unspoiled beaches and local ouzo was now something closer to a holding centre.
Around 3am, a police car pulled up next to the jeep in which Binder and Mardini sat. An impromptu visit like this was not unusual. As the overwhelming chaos of the crisis’ early months had settled into a more stable kind of misery, volunteers noticed that the local police had taken the opportunity to reassert their authority, making frequent, unannounced check-ins.
Someone had already warned Binder and Mardini that the police were visiting all the organisations on the island that day.
After checking their IDs, Mardini and Binder say, one of the police officers walked around to the back of the ERCI jeep and told them that the rear licence plate was askew. He pulled it off, revealing a military licence plate underneath.
Mardini and Binder were baffled. The vehicle had been purchased from a used-car dealership — they had no idea where the plates came from.
A second car of police and coastguard officers arrived and the volunteers were asked to drive back to the port, accompanied by two officers.
When they reached the coast guard station, Binder and Mardini were put under arrest. “We thought it was a joke,” Binder said.
They didn’t know anything about the plates, nor was it apparent how a hidden plate was supposed to help the jeep pass as a military vehicle — it was painted silver and decorated with huge ERCI logos.
That morning, Binder and Mardini hand their fingerprints taken and were lined up for mug shots. They were made to sign documents in Greek that they didn’t understand and then put in a cell together.
A few hours later, Binder led the police to the ERCI house and warehouse, where officers rifled through boxes, found nothing, and returned to the station.
Soon after that, the police released them and informed them that they had opened an investigation.
A friend sent Binder an article on a conservative Greek website describing in lurid detail a foiled scheme concocted by a German spy — Binder, apparently — and his Syrian accomplice to gather intelligence on the Greek navy. It all seemed absurd. Binder took a screenshot of the article and sent it to his mother in Ireland.
For six months, life continued as usual. However, the morning that Mardini was scheduled to travel to Germany, Binder received a call from a mutual friend who sounded agitated. She explained that Mardini had been taken in again to the police station and that the police also wanted to talk to Binder.
When he arrived at the station, he found Mardini in an upstairs room seated across from a police officer typing on a computer. Binder asked what was going on but the man just grunted.
After a few hours of waiting, Binder got up and said he was going to leave. The officer stopped typing and looked up from his computer.
“Sit down,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Around midday, a lawyer arrived to represent the two volunteers. He said they would be taken to the prosecutor’s office in the local courthouse to answer a few questions. Binder and Mardini were told to put out their arms and an officer handcuffed them together for the trip to the courthouse.
For Binder, his first reaction was not fear or anger but a sense of betrayal and disbelief.
“I worked with the people who arrested me,” he said. “I called them in emergencies. They asked us for help. We shared resources with them.”
Now he was in their custody.
At the courthouse, Binder and Mardini came to understand the true scope of their situation. The odd incident with the military plate had been transformed into the starting point for far more serious allegations.
According to the narrative presented by prosecutors and the police, Binder and Mardini were not humanitarians at all but members of a sprawling criminal cabal responsible for trafficking droves of migrants into Greece.
While more than three dozen volunteers from a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were implicated, the crux of the investigation focused on Binder, Mardini, two ERCI staff members named Athanasios Karakitsos and Mirella Alexou. and ERCI founder Panos Moraitis.
The charges included espionage, forgery, and the illegal use of radio frequencies. They would grow to include trafficking, fraud, money laundering, and being part of a criminal organisation.
For their work saving lives on the shores of Lesbos, the humanitarians each faced up to a quarter of a century in prison.
Targetting NGOs
Greece’s prosecution of Binder, Mardini, and the other ERCI members is only the most dramatic example of the targetting of NGOs.
Across Europe, NGOs and volunteers have faced suspicion, harassment, and prosecution for even simple acts of charity, such as distributing food or offering shelter.
Once cheered for their work, many are now condemned and vilified — and sometimes, as in the case of Binder, Mardini and others in ERCI, face decades in prison.
The stifling of NGOs and the loss of public attention have enabled a new level of cruelty against migrants.
In February, 12 migrants froze to death near the Greek-Turkish border, reportedly after Greek border guards stripped the migrants of their clothes and shoes and forced them back toward Turkey. (Greece’s migration minister denied the claims.)
Meanwhile, thousands of migrants disappear into a network of secretive detention centres run by the EU’s Libyan partners. Those caught inside Libya’s lucrative smuggling trade are often kept in giant warehouses, treated as goods waiting to be moved.
Although access by media and human rights organisations is sparse, there have been accounts of torture, rape, and murder, as well as evidence, first reported by CNN in 2017, of migrants being sold as slaves at open-air auctions.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the international humanitarian NGO, reported in 2018 that it sent 50 body bags per week to just one camp.
Almost seven years on from the outset of the migrant crisis, these anecdotes have largely lost their power to shock — in part because there is rarely anyone there to see them and little public appetite to hear about them.
It is a significant fall from the hope and engagement of 2015, when the wave of volunteers who flocked to Lesbos was celebrated as embodiments of the very best of the EU. However, on Lesbos, as with the entire experience of the migrant crisis, the turn from gratitude to hostility was especially swift and intense.
Among those who arrived on Lesbos in 2015 were Sara Mardini and her younger sister, Yusra. They had a comfortable upbringing in the Damascus suburb of Daraya, daughters of a physiotherapist mother and a swim-coach father.
The civil war came to their door in 2012 when a battle between rebels and government forces left their neighbourhood in ruins. The teenage sisters eventually received permission from their parents to flee to Europe with two male relatives.
They travelled to Lebanon and then to Turkey, where they paid a smuggler to help them reach Greece. On their first try, the Turkish coast guard interrupted their departure. On their second try, in August 2015, the engine stalled and the vessel, an inflatable dinghy crammed with 20 people, began taking on water.
Sara and Yusra were both high-level competitive swimmers. They and other passengers jumped into the sea, swimming for most of the three-and-a-half-hour trip to keep the craft afloat as the engine cut in and out.
When they finally came ashore on Lesbos, it was late at night. With their phone dead, all they knew was where they were: a beach with small rocks, flanked on one side by a large cliff.
They saw lights from a restaurant directly ahead and the group began walking towards it. When they asked the owner for food, he refused. They offered €50 but he still refused. It was their first memory of Europe.
At sea and on land, the sisters’ chilly reception was one consequence of a turn already under way in EU migration policy.
In April 2015, the EU — wary of the rising number of migrant arrivals and the deaths at sea that accompanied them — began a “war on smugglers”.
One aspect of the initiative, Operation Sophia, involved deploying military vessels to capture and destroy the boats used by migrant smugglers. By its stated metric, the policy was a clear success — in just over two years the operation captured and sank over 400 boats.
However, the policy had a perverse effect; with their larger, more seaworthy wooden boats being destroyed, human smugglers shifted to using cheaper, more dangerous rubber dinghies. NGOs found themselves caught in the middle, trying to save lives amid an escalating battle between human smugglers and EU border control.
The consequences were especially clear in the central Mediterranean, in the waters between Libya and Italy. As the risk of capsizings grew, search-and-rescue NGOs responded by deploying more boats closer to Libyan waters, sometimes at the direction of the Italian coastguard.
The NGOs saved lives. When they were out at sea, the migrant mortality rate declined noticeably; when they withdrew, as they did during the winter season, the mortality rate surged. At the same time, their existence may have helped reinforce the dangerous shifts already under way in the smuggling industry.
With rescue vessels moving closer to Libyan waters, smugglers put their human cargo in ever more perilous crafts on the assumption that help was only a short distance away.
By 2017, NGOs were assisting in more than 40% of rescues in the Mediterranean, a sharp increase from three years earlier when NGOs were involved in 1% of rescues.
The expanding role of NGOs fed a perception that they were acting as a “pull factor”; that by rescuing migrants at sea, NGOs only encouraged more and riskier journeys, thereby actually increasing deaths. More fringe observers accused NGOs of secretly conspiring with smugglers to bring migrants into Europe.
The most extreme version of the “pull factor” narrative found a home and ready promoter in a constellation of far-right blogs pushing the conspiracy theory that European leaders were undertaking a “great replacement” of the continent’s population.
Among the most active and vocal of these outlets was Gefira. On December 4, 2016, it published an article titled: “NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale”, which claimed that NGOs were involved in a “big scam and illegal human traffic operation”.
The article ricocheted around other right-wing sites but its arguments had a limited audience.
Some 11 days later, the allegations went mainstream when an article in The Financial Times reported that NGOs were supposedly “colluding” with smugglers. Citing confidential reports from Frontex, the EU’s border and coast guard agency, the article described the agency’s belief that migrants were being given “clear indications before departure on the precise direction to be followed in order to reach the NGOs’ boats”, including at least one case when “criminal networks were smuggling migrants directly on an NGO vessel”.
The Financial Times soon issued a partial retraction, walking back the most incendiary claims and admitting that it had “overstated” the accusations. Still, Frontex’s official report, issued two months later, stated that NGOs were unintentionally helping smugglers and thereby increasing the flow of migrants.
Lesbos volunteers
In January 2016, just as the first volunteers from ERCI arrived on Lesbos, the Greek government announced that all NGOs operating on the island would be required to register their activities with the authorities and provide the names and photos of all their members. The policy’s aim, according to the government, was the “continuous co-ordination and control of their actions”.
NGOs immediately reported an increase in police checks, verbal harassment, and arbitrary searches.
That same month, the coast guard on Lesbos arrested five search-and-rescue volunteers, including three Spanish firefighters, after the men responded to a distress call from a migrant ship at sea. They were charged with aiding illegal migration and faced up to 10 years in prison.
In the months that followed, Lesbos became a laboratory for other restrictive policies, such as the automatic detention of unaccompanied male migrants from certain countries.
The tightening atmosphere on Lesbos signalled the escalation of a crackdown that was well under way across the continent. In Denmark, hundreds of people were fined after they offered rides to migrants walking along roadways.
In Italy, volunteers were arrested for violating a ban on distributing food to migrants. In Hungary, new laws made it a crime simply to inform migrants of their right to seek asylum.
Even as new arrivals declined significantly from their 2015 peak, restrictions on how, where, and whom NGOs could help proliferated.
It was precisely injustices such as these that had led Corkman Seán Binder to Lesbos in the first place.
“There doesn’t need to be a dramatic moment when you realise people drowning in the sea is unfair,” he said.
You don’t need an awakening. It’s just unfair.
He had spent most of his life as an outsider, the son of a German mother and a Vietnamese refugee father in a rural corner of Ireland. The experience had instilled in him a deep-rooted sense of right and wrong.
After college, he completed a graduate degree in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a focus on European security and defence policy.
As the migrant crisis unfolded, he felt that he had a responsibility to help. He joined ERCI in October 2017 as a search-and-rescue diver and an aid worker in Kara Tepe, a smaller camp set aside for especially vulnerable groups such as unaccompanied children.
He met Mardini, who had settled in Berlin but decided to return to Lesbos as a volunteer with ERCI.
“When I’m afraid of something, I go do it,” she said. “That’s how I get over it.”
The pair became fast friends.
Binder and Mardini stayed on as the situation on the island started to deteriorate. The notorious Moria refugee camp, where they volunteered in an ERCI medical clinic, ballooned to a population of more than 6,000 people, double its capacity.
Migrants who expected to reach Lesbos and continue on to other parts of Europe found themselves stuck on the island as the overburdened Greek asylum system struggled to handle the enormous number of applications it received.
As Mardini and Binder sat in their jail cells awaiting trial, the case against ERCI came into clearer view.
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After “many months of in-depth investigation”, the police said in a statement they had determined that at least six Greeks and 24 foreigners were involved in “an organised criminal network that systematically facilitated the illegal entry of foreigners” under the guise of humanitarian aid.
They released an 86-page report that detailed the allegations that would form the basis of the prosecution.
The case was built on a series of overlapping charges, each one linking into the next. There was the spectacular charge of espionage. To support this claim, the Lesbos police said that ERCI had listened to radio chatter from Frontex and the coastguard, while also concealing its own illicit exchanges of “confidential information” by using “encrypted social networking and communication” tools.
ERCI accepted donations, which added a money-laundering charge; facilitating the illegal entry of foreigners was a violation of the state’s Migration Code; and the ERCI jeep with the false military plates constituted forgery. Together, these offences made ERCI a criminal organisation.
In a November 2018 report, Human Rights Watch rebuffed these claims, noting that the report issued by the Lesbos police said explicitly that the radio channels were, in fact, open to anyone with a VHF radio, a standard piece of equipment on any ship.
Moreover, these same radio channels were used by the coast guard to communicate with ERCI and other nonprofit rescue groups.
The close partnership between ERCI and the coastguard was not in dispute. Soon after Binder and Mardini were arrested, the deputy head of the coastguard in Mytilene confirmed under oath that ERCI members regularly alerted him to incoming boats.
The encrypted messaging service that ERCI volunteers had supposedly used to mask their correspondence was simply a WhatsApp thread shared by a number of humanitarian actors on the island.
There were even more basic problems with the evidence, the Human Rights Watch report said. Of the 11 instances when Binder and Mardini supposedly engaged in human smuggling — occasions when ERCI helped rescue migrants in distress at sea — Binder was in Britain on at least six of those occasions; five occurred before he even joined ERCI. Mardini was also out of the country on six of the stated dates.
The money-laundering charge levelled against Mardini was pinned to a single piece of evidence: Facebook messages in which Mardini wrote of her work with ERCI, “I am a longtime volunteer and I help with fundraising.”
Beyond the shortcomings of the evidence, the case seemed to contradict clear provisions of Greek law. The felony accusations claimed that ERCI’s work constituted human trafficking. Yet the law that Binder and Mardini were accused of violating expressly excludes helping asylum seekers.
The Human Rights Watch report noted that the police paradoxically referred to the people ERCI rescued as “refugees”, while at the same time describing efforts to help them as “trafficking”, a crime that involves force, fraud, or coercion.
Despite the sensational claim of espionage, there was no assertion of whom Binder and Mardini were supposedly spying for.
Bill Van Esveld, an associate director in the children’s rights division at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report, told me that he was appalled by what he found when he combed through the evidence and allegations.
“You don’t have to dig very far before it starts to look really, really abusive,” he said.
“The sloppiness of the evidence against them, that indicates that an effort to ascertain the facts was second to something else.”
He suspected that the indictment was meant as a warning to anyone who might help migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers on Lesbos or elsewhere in Greece.
“This is about a bigger objective,” Van Esveld said. “Absolutely destroy the NGOs and sow the ground with salt.”
While lawyers combed through the documents, Binder and Mardini remained in pretrial detention, in Binder’s case alongside murder suspects and arms traffickers. Greek law allows up to 18 months of pretrial detention, and Binder tried to brace himself for the possibility that they would serve the entire term.
In early December, the court granted their petition for pretrial release. Altogether, they had been held for 106 days.
Judicial limbo
More than four years after their initial arrest, Binder, Mardini, and their colleagues remain caught in judicial limbo. At first, Binder expected the case to move quickly. The accusations were extraordinary and the evidence threadbare.
It was only a matter of time until the charges were dropped or he and his fellow volunteers were acquitted, he thought.
However, months came and went, and then years. The Greek police were continuing to investigate and gather evidence, and the prosecutor was evaluating the case — that was all Binder heard.
While Binder waited, he watched from afar as the humanitarian community on Lesbos withered and the island itself slid toward chaos.
The dismantling of ERCI had changed the mood. Far-right groups seemed empowered. Two weeks after Binder and Mardini were taken into custody, vandals destroyed a monument to drowned migrants that had been built in a small harbour outside Mytilene. Vandals had defaced the monument the previous year but this time they demolished it down to its concrete base.
Many of ERCI’s remaining volunteers departed the island as quickly as they could, sometimes without telling anyone they were leaving. Other NGOs involved in search and rescue also shut down their operations.
“Everyone freaked out, especially doing search and rescue,” said Fabiana de Lima Faria, a former ERCI volunteer who worked on Lesbos for several years.
Everyone thought they would be next.
When rescue boats came to port, local residents gathered to harass them.
In ERCI’s old area of operations on the south of the island, there had once been at least four humanitarian organisations with rescue vessels at any given time. Within a few months of the arrests, there were none.
Migrants continued to hazard the journey. In 2019, Lesbos had more new arrivals in a 12-month period than it had in the previous two years combined. The consequences of the NGO withdrawal were clear and immediate.
In March 2019, local media reported that the Greek coast guard recovered the body of a girl on a southern beach. The child, who was believed to have drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of the island the previous month, was nine years old. Her body was found without a head.
As elsewhere in Europe, the proportion of Afghan and African migrants increased, adding fuel to the narrative that Lesbos was now an established route for economic migration into Europe.
With borders closed and the asylum-and-resettlement system ground almost to a halt, the camps on the island swelled once again. From approximately 5,000 residents in July 2019, Moria had upward of 20,000 people by the beginning of 2020. The more overcrowded the camps became, the more resistance arose from migrants and local residents alike.
Then, the government in Athens announced that it would begin construction on new facilities for migrants on several of the Aegean islands, including Lesbos — the least desirable outcome for everyone involved.
When the construction equipment for the new facilities arrived in port, local residents formed a blockade to stop it from reaching the building site. The government delayed its plans for Lesbos.
International politics provided the last nudge to push the island over the brink. In February 2020, after four years of co-operation with EU authorities, Turkey announced that it would no longer prevent migrants from leaving its territory and heading towards Europe.
By one estimate, more than 150,000 people gathered on Turkey’s western coast, aiming to reach the nearby Greek islands. Apparently hoping to stem the flow, the Greek government suspended the filing of all asylum claims for one month — a move with no legal basis. (Athens said it would ask the EU for a special dispensation.)
Lesbos descended into something like a war zone, with clashes in the streets between far-right and far-left groups. Journalists and humanitarian volunteers were beaten and their car windows were smashed.
Menacing roadblocks sprang up on some of the island’s main roads. Migrants, as always, paid the heaviest price. When a migrant boat came into port, local residents flocked to the landing, cursing at the passengers to leave. Even more radicalised groups gathered to stalk the island at night and volunteers evacuated in panic.
“It’s victims fighting among each other,” Louis Pillot, a humanitarian aid worker who served on the island, said. “Greek people are victims as much as the asylum seekers. Everyone on the island is.”
When Covid-19 hit, it imposed a strange kind of respite. Sudden lockdowns put a lid on the anti-migrant violence that had threatened to spiral out of control, but the peace was achieved partly by keeping the population of Moria penned inside the camp even after the rest of the island had eased its restrictive measures.
In September, the camp burned down, leaving thousands homeless at the start of winter.
The Greek coast guard was credibly accused by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and others of organised pushbacks of migrant boats; at the same time, masked and unidentified Greek officials illegally returned migrants to Turkey, including individuals who were apprehended hundreds of miles inside Greek territory. (The Greek government has stated that the pushbacks are not illegal and has denied returning migrants to Turkey.)
“The pushbacks and other things happening today wouldn’t have been possible in 2015, 2016, when there were so many eyes there, big and small, watching,” said aid worker Farshad Shamgholi, who spent several years on Lesbos. “Now it just happens. You just read it in the news and that’s it.”
Meanwhile, the EU has seemed to embrace Greece’s tactics. In 2020, the bloc announced €700m in funds for Greece, half of it for immediate use to construct and upgrade border infrastructure.
Frontex also deployed an additional 100 border guards, supplemented by boats, helicopters, and an aircraft, to augment Greek officers. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen travelled to the Greek-Turkish border to praise the combined effort.
“This border is not only a Greek border, it is also a European border,” she said. “I thank Greece for being our European shield in these times.”
Sebastian Kurz, then the Austrian chancellor and head of the right-wing People’s Party, warned EU states against taking in migrants gathered on the Greek-Turkish border.
“If we do, soon it will be hundreds of thousands and later maybe millions,” he said.
Greek justice system
Last August, Binder and Mardini received word that the case against them was moving ahead — or part of it, at least. The years of waiting and delay had finally hit a hard deadline: in the Greek justice system, police have a maximum of five years to conduct investigations into misdemeanour crimes before the prosecution must decide whether to try the case.
Among the string of charges facing Binder and Mardini were several misdemeanours, including forgery of a licence plate. The police dated the beginning of ERCI’s criminal activity to autumn 2016 so the five-year window was about to shut. (The felony charges, which can be investigated for up to 15 years before a decision is made on prosecution, would have to wait.)
To Binder, the news was not entirely unwelcome. With his life on hold, he had decided to study law in London, with the aim of becoming a human rights lawyer. However, when he completed his studies and applied to an inn of court, a necessary step to practice in Britain, he was told it was unlikely he would be accepted because of the outstanding criminal charges against him.
Similarly, his British visa application will most likely be held up as long as the case remains active. A trial would be a first step in settling the matter and proving his innocence, he thought.
The trial opened on November 18. Greek authorities refused Mardini’s request to enter the country, so she was unable to attend. In fact, only a handful of the 24 defendants were present.
The indictment listed the accused by number rather than name, making it likely that many of the accused did not know they were on trial. Even those in the room did not know which crimes they had been accused of. The writ of summons received by Binder and Mardini was missing a page.
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The proceedings lasted only a few hours before the case was adjourned, with the three-member panel of judges sending it to a superior court. The next hearing is expected to happen this year. At that point, the trial will most likely be adjourned again for procedural reasons.
A couple of months after the hearing, Binder and Mardini’s lawyers learned that the felony prosecution was also moving forward. The defendants will shortly be delivered a formal indictment and called to the courthouse in Mytilene to give depositions. Mardini, who remains barred from entering Greece, will have to receive permission to attend her own trial.
When I spoke to Binder recently, it was the first time in our three years of conversations that I heard real strain and despondency in his voice. Back home in Britain, he was trying to find ways to keep up his spirits.
Still unable to work in the field of law, he was thinking of running for student government at his university.
A campaign called Free Humanitarians was trying to press the case at the EU level and draw attention to similar prosecutions across Europe.
When Binder first arrived on Lesbos, he intended to stay only a few months. He was 24 when he was arrested; today he’s nearing 30. His lawyers had warned him that the case could take a decade in all to resolve.
He was watching his life recede away from him, month by month, year by year, at the mercy of a system that has branded him a criminal for trying to help people whom most others seem content to forget.
It was beginning to hit him that his time on the island would be, one way or another, the defining experience of his life. Despite the toll, he refused to regret the impulse that brought him to Lesbos in the first place — the impulse to help.
“To regret it is to accept it,” he said. “I still resist it. This shouldn’t happen to anyone.”
This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared in ‘The New York Times’.
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