‘The real smugglers are rarely on the boat’: activists in Greece question jailing asylum seekers | Global development
Mohanad was 15 when he was arrested by Greek authorities in November 2022 after arriving in Crete on a vessel that left Libya. He is now accused of smuggling 476 people and is awaiting trial later this year.
He is one of hundreds of people, including children and people traveling with their families, who have been arrested under Greece’s tough anti-smuggling law, which came into effect in 2014, with sentences of up to 25 years in prison.
Lawyers reported that the trials against the smugglers were riddled with procedural flaws and a lack of evidence. Often the most vulnerable are those who will be steering the boat, they say, including men who agree to do so in exchange for a reduced price of passage for their family members. Arrests are arbitrary, they say, if it’s not clear who was in control of the boat.
Criminalizing refugees and asylum-seekers is also useless at breaking up smuggling networks, say NGOs and legal experts, because the real smugglers are usually not on the boat.
Last year, an Afghan refugee received €15,920 (£13,660) in compensation after wrongfully accused of people smuggling. He has served more than two years of a 50-year prison sentence after being named as the man driving the ship, lawyers say, because he happened to be at its helm. The real culprits abandoned the boat much earlier.
In Mohanad’s case, his father Hassan, a fisherman from Egypt who was traveling on the same boat, was also arrested and charged with operating for profit after reportedly agreeing to take care of some tasks on board to help payment of the fee. He was sentenced in March 2023 to 280 years in prison. (Despite the nominal length of these sentences, the maximum time inmates can serve is between 20 and 25 years with options for early release.)
Now his 16-year-old son Mohanad is facing the same charges: smuggling for profit, endangering the lives of passengers and participating in a criminal organization. Although he is still a minor, he could go to prison for up to eight years, according to his lawyer, Maria Fluraki, who said “the real smuggler who took the money is rarely on the boat.”
In Greece, controlling the boat or driving the vehicle that facilitates unauthorized entry is a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison for each person transported. The penalty can be higher depending on additional charges, such as endangering the lives of passengers if the boat gets into trouble.
Those imprisoned for smuggling now make up 20% of Greece’s prison population, with more than 2,000 people detained as of February 2023, according to data released by the Greek Ministry of Civil Protection.
The ministry did not respond to requests for more information, but earlier this year Greece’s migration minister, Dimitris Kairidis reiterated the importance of his policy to tackle smuggling in a meeting with the EU.
after the promotion of the newsletter
In another case, Homayun Sabetara, who fled Iran, was arrested in September 2021 and charged with smuggling for taking himself and seven other people across the Turkish-Greek border. According to Sabetara, he was forced to drive the car by the smugglers who abandoned them in the forest near the border. He received an 18-year sentence.
People accused of smuggling are presumed guilty from the start and convicted based on scant evidence, activists and lawyers say. “There are only some testimonies of passengers who saw my client handing out food and water, that’s all,” says Fluraki. A written statement from a Coast Guard officer may be enough for a conviction, she adds.
Most of those accused of smuggling have no access to legal support until the day they go to court, says Dimitris Choulis, a lawyer with the Human Rights Legal Project on the Greek island of Samos. The appointed public defender will only see your file shortly before the trial.
Julia Winkler works with the NGO Borderline Europe and has overseen dozens of smuggling cases in Greece over the past five years. She says that in more than two-thirds of the cases she has seen, the prosecution’s main witness was absent, making cross-examination impossible — a violation of fair trial standards. She also says that some people have been waiting for several months in pre-trial detention without knowing why, because all the documents they received or signed were in Greek.
Last month, Sabetara’s trial in an appeal against his 18-year sentence was postponed for another five months to give the court time to find the key witness, who did not attend either the original trial or the appeal hearing.
“The decision to adjourn the trial to hear the key witness can make the trial fairer and also acknowledge the flaws in the trial at first instance,” Chulis says. A proposed motion to release Sabetara for a time given his fragile health was rejected.
Mohanad currently lives in an accommodation for unaccompanied minors in Crete, but Fluraki says he has suffered greatly from his father’s imprisonment, separation from the rest of his family and uncertainty about his future. In February, his trial was postponed until November.
