Colin Sheridan: Seán Binder was cleared — but the damage to humanitarian activism is already done

Seán Binder’s acquittal raises uncomfortable questions about how Europe treats humanitarian work, and why quiet activism rarely survives public memory

This week, Seán Binder, an Irish lawyer and former humanitarian worker from Co Kerry, was found not guilty in a Greek court of people smuggling, belonging to a criminal organisation, and money-laundering. The prosecutor advised acquittal. The judges agreed unanimously. After almost eight years, the case collapsed.

“The foundation of the smuggling charge was that we did search and rescue,” Binder said afterwards. The spying charge was that they used Whatsapp. The money-laundering charge stemmed from fundraising to buy laundry machines. 

“It was farcical.”

Those words matter. Not only because they clear his name, but because they expose the mechanics of how easily language can be weaponised. How a life of work can be flattened into six or seven poisonous words that travel faster than any correction ever will. “Irishman accused of human trafficking” will claim quite a few clicks.

Binder had been facing up to 20 years in prison for volunteering with others on Lesvos, helping to rescue refugees attempting the crossing to Greece. For seven years, he said, that threat hung over his life. He was not allowed to work. He could not plan a family. He could not move forward.

Refugees scramble ashore at Skala Sikaminias, on the Greek island of Lesvos, after crossing the Aegean on a dinghy from Turkey on March 2, 2020. Seán Binder had been offering humanitarian aid when he was arrested and eventually charged with people-smuggling, belonging to a criminal organisation, and money-laundering. This week he was found not guilty of all charges. Picture: Michael Varaklas/AP

“I have been unable to do very much with my life,” he said, with a calmness that is more unsettling than anger. What makes Binder’s story arresting is not only the danger he found himself in, but the unfamiliarity of his type. 

We are fluent in celebrity activism now. We know the rhythms: The panels, the podcasts, the carefully distressed hoodies, the moral urgency packaged for circulation. Binder belongs to a quieter lineage. People who do not build a profile so much as a practice.

He studied law and immersed himself in migration, refugee protection, and the dry architectures of human rights that most of us are vaguely glad exist and equally glad someone else is minding. 

He worked in spaces that do not attract applause: Ports, back rooms with bad lighting where unfashionable subjects such as immigration systems, migrant labour trends, and race studies are taken seriously, line by line.

Pope Francis visited Karatepe refugee camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece, on December 5, 2021, amid the humanitarian refugee crisis. Picture: Alessandra Tarantino/AP

This is where most real activism lives. 

Not in slogans, but in spreadsheets. Not in viral clips, but in footnotes. It happens slowly, and often in the dark. The word ‘activist’ itself has been thinned out by overuse. It is now frequently spoken with a curl in the lip, a shorthand for nuisance, naïveté, or performance. An activist is someone who interrupts. Someone who complicates. Someone — according to the many who despise them — who should grow up. 

Binder complicates that dismissal. Because what do you call someone who repeatedly placed himself in proximity to human suffering not because it was visible, but because it was there? Who organised his professional life around people who have no audience at all?

There is little in his story that fits the modern reward system. 

He is unlikely to tour the talk-show circuit. He is unlikely to convert this into a brand. Even his humour — “if you’re going to go to prison, you should go on a Greek island” — has the flatness of someone more interested in surviving than performing.

If anything, his case suggests the opposite moral to the one we usually offer young people. That doing this kind of work does not protect you. It may endanger you. That the institutions you might imagine as allies can become instruments of deterrence.

Binder himself was explicit about that. He believes the real aim of the prosecution was not to secure a conviction, but to stop others from coming. And on that count, he said, it succeeded.

The only real outcome of all of this is that it has stopped people from engaging in search and rescue. 

Which makes me wonder — will we ever teach his story in schools? Not as a “case”, nor a current affairs sidebar, but as an example of what a life can look like when it is not built around extraction — of money, of status, of attention — but around obligation. Around the decision, made early and kept repeatedly, to move towards what is difficult and largely unseen. We tell young people endlessly to “make a difference”. 

A file photo from November 2021 of German-born Irish-reared Seán Binder outside the court of Mytilene on the island of Lesvos on November 18, 2021. Picture: Manolis Lagoutaris/AFP/Getty 

We are vaguer about what that entails. Binder’s life offers one possible answer, and it is not especially marketable. 

It involves specialisation and patience and a tolerance for obscurity. A willingness to become deeply knowledgeable about things that will never trend.

It also involves risk. Not metaphorical risk. Real risk. The kind that does not arrive as a motivational quote, but as a court summons in a foreign country, written in a language you do not command.

After his arrest, Binder retrained as a barrister, inspired, he said, by people he met in prison who were even more adversely affected by the criminal justice system. 

Apparently, he joked, he “can’t get enough of the criminal law”. The line is light, but what sits beneath it is not: A life diverted, reshaped by an ordeal he did not seek and could not avoid. 

In 2022, Seán Binder was featured in the TG4 documentary series Finné produced by Tua Films and presented by RTÉ correspondent Orla O'Donnell. Picture: TG4

Perhaps that is why figures like him rarely survive in public memory. We are better at remembering those who speak than those who work. Better at honouring outrage than endurance. Better at celebrating the moment than the maintenance.

So Binder may yet become what the headline briefly made him: A confusion, a curiosity, a name misfiled. Next week, there will be others. There always are.

But somewhere between a Kerry childhood and a Greek port, between a darkened lecture theatre and a courtroom in Mytilene, there is a version of activism that still exists. It does not look like a movement, but it does look like a person. Turning up, again and again. Usually while none of us are watching.