Maeve Higgins: Migration is being punished, even as asylum is promised 

Migrants and humanitarians who help them — including Seán Binder who is on trial in Lesbos — are being criminalised while states get away with breaching international law

Migrants clamber ashore on Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey on a dinghy on March 2, 2020. File picture: Michael Varaklas/AP

The criminal case held last week in Lesbos against 24 humanitarians for helping migrants sounded like a joke, but not a funny one. 

In court were volunteers with a small Greek NGO, Emergency Response Centre International, a search-and-rescue organisation that has since disbanded, including Seán Binder, a Kerry man and rescue diver.

Also charged was Sarah Mardini, a Syrian refugee who herself survived a dangerous sea crossing with her sister and went on to swim at the Olympics. 

They were arrested by Greek authorities in 2018 and charged with serious crimes, including espionage and smuggling, with scant evidence and clear political motives. They have been awaiting trial since then, with some months in prison.

Irish man Seán Binder with his mother outside the court on Lesbos in Greece after a 2021 hearing in the case. Picture: Manolis Lagoutaris/AFP/Getty

While the judge in last week’s trial dismissed some misdemeanour charges, the humanitarians still face felony charges down the line.

Speaking to RTÉ News, Binder explained the far-reaching impact of the criminalisation of solidarity.

“The cost is more than personal,” he said. “The cost is no more search and rescue operations happening from this island. 

People continue to drown because people are afraid to do this kind of work. 

Binder is, sadly, correct about that cost. The Mediterranean crossing is now the deadliest in the world. in 2022, 376 people died or went missing along the route, according to the International Organization for Migration. 

Of the hundreds of thousands of people trying to reach Europe in this past decade, there are men, women, and children from across Africa and the Middle East. Some need asylum; some want a safer, better life than is possible where they were born. None should be left to drown, it is only right to prevent that, yet those who do are punished.

'Pushbacks' breaching international law 

The wildest thing about this push to criminalise those helping migrants is that criminals are operating on the EU borders and the Mediterranean, but those criminals are not the ones being prosecuted. 

The criminals are often the forces doing the policing and the prosecuting. Perhaps you have heard of pushbacks, a blunt word for any number of ways nation states refuse to allow migrants to enter or stay within their borders. 

State forces push migrants back, sometimes in illegal ways. Pushbacks can look like uniformed and masked men stripping and beating migrants before pushing them back over a land border, or it can look like migrants being forced back onto rickety boats and forced back into Turkish or Libyan waters.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights explains: “Pushbacks entail a variety of state measures aimed at forcing refugees and migrants out of their territory while obstructing access to applicable legal and procedural frameworks. 

"In doing so, states circumvent safeguards governing international protection [including minors], detention or custody, expulsion, and the use of force.”

A Syrian refugee holds on to his children as he struggles to alight from a dinghy on Lesbos after crossing part of the Aegean from Turkey in 2015. Picture: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Last month, the investigative journalists at Lighthouse Reports revealed that security forces along EU borders in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Croatia have been using secret facilities to systematically detain people seeking refuge before illegally deporting them. 

This is a violation of international law. 

But, in some cases, the EU supports and sustains these illegal pushbacks. 

In 2021, the German newspaper Der Spiegel showed videos of pushbacks to current and former senior officers in the Greek coastguard, and they identified the masked men as members of elite Greek coast guard units: The Underwater Operations and Special Operations. This is what EU courts should prosecute, not people who are there to help.

NGOs doing vital work

Even saying that the NGOs provide ‘help’ is misleading. 

The work these NGOs and volunteers do is often vital, and the governments of various states badly need them to do that work. Civil organisations often fill in the blanks left by inadequate state infrastructure. 

The researchers also point out the hypocrisy and mixed messages these EU nations are sending out to those who would lend a hand to migrants. 

In 2016, the same year dozens of volunteers were arrested for facilitating irregular migration, the European Economic and Social Committee awarded its Civil Society Prize to those “who have demonstrated outstanding examples of solidarity towards refugees and migrants”.

People alienated by 'crimmigration'  

The term ‘crimmigration’ is usually credited to Juliet Stumpf, a law professor, who coined it back in 2006 to describe the troubling convergence of immigration and criminal law. Prof Stumpf focused on how the US was criminalising immigrants, specifically the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the country back then. 

Instead of an amnesty to regularise these immigrants’ presence, the state decided to push millions further into the shadows. Crimmigration leads to, in Stumpf’s words, “an ever-expanding population of the excluded and alienated”.

Now, in many parts of the supposedly humane and civilised Global North, like EU countries and the US, movement towards and across their borders is either treated as or is a crime. Migration is punished, even as asylum is promised. And even that level of crimmigration is not enough.

Now, as we can see clearly from the Lesbos case, not only are migrants criminalised, so are  those who try to help them. Meanwhile, the real criminals grow in strength and numbers and stalk our borders freely, pushing people back illegally, funded by us.