Greece Is Putting Human Rights Defenders on Trial

Two human rights defenders who spent years documenting abuses against migrants on Greece's borders are about to stand trial on the island of Rhodes, and they could face up to 20 years in prison. Human Rights Watch said in a report published October 3, 2026 that the prosecution of Panayote Dimitras and Tommy Olsen is a politically motivated attempt to silence them, with the trial set to begin on October 6, 2026.

Dimitras is the founder and president of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, a Greek civil liberties group. Olsen is a Norwegian national who founded the Aegean Boat Report, which tracks what happens to people crossing the Aegean Sea toward Europe. The two are being prosecuted alongside two Cameroonian asylum seekers on charges of forming or joining a criminal organization, for profit and as a profession, to facilitate the entry and stay of non-Greek nationals on Greek territory.

The charges, brought in early 2023, do not accuse the men of violence or of running a smuggling ring for money in the conventional sense. According to Human Rights Watch, the indictment instead seeks to criminalize the defendants' practice of notifying Greek authorities and international bodies of the whereabouts of newly arrived asylum seekers, so those people can enter the country's asylum procedure rather than being pushed back to Türkiye.

The work that became evidence

For years, Dimitras and Olsen documented and publicized human rights violations against asylum seekers and migrants, including violent pushbacks by Greek authorities that the European Court of Human Rights has characterized as systematic. Amnesty International said the charges are a gross misuse of anti-smuggling legislation with no supporting evidence, and added that this is the first time human rights workers have been sent to trial for helping people access asylum procedures.

The men's lawyers and supporters say the prosecution flips the meaning of rescue. In July 2021, Dimitras and Olsen were supporting asylum seekers on the island of Kos, helping them reach the asylum procedure while also documenting pushbacks — the illegal practice of summarily forcing people back across borders, which Greece has already been found guilty of by Europe's top human rights court. Amnesty International reports that there is no indication the two men did anything beyond helping people exercise their rights and recording what happened.

The Greek state has not framed the case as an attack on activism. Prosecutors have presented the men as participants in an organized operation that moved people into the country outside legal channels. That counterpoint matters: governments routinely argue that anti-smuggling laws are legitimate tools of border control, even when rights groups say the laws are being stretched to punish solidarity. The trial on Rhodes will test which reading a Greek court accepts.

Norway already looked at the same facts — and refused

Olsen's case has already been examined by another country's courts, and the result was a blunt rejection of Greece's position. On March 16, 2026, Olsen was arrested in Norway under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Greece. On May 15, 2026, the Hålogaland Court of Appeal refused to surrender him, concluding that the acts described by the Greek authorities are not criminal offenses under Norwegian law and that extradition would risk violating his freedom of expression.

The Norwegian ruling creates a striking split. The same conduct that a Norwegian appellate court treated as lawful human rights work remains the basis of a Greek prosecution carrying a sentence of two decades. Because Greek prosecutors have kept their arrest warrants active, Olsen would face arrest and detention if he traveled to Greece to defend himself, which means the trial may proceed without him in the room — a trial in absentia under international law.

Dimitras, who lives in Greece, is not in detention but is under a travel ban that prevents him from leaving the country. The court summons specifies that under Greek law the defendants will be tried in their absence if they neither appear nor send a lawyer.

A pattern, not an exception

Human Rights Watch describes the case as part of a well-documented pattern of Greek authorities misusing criminal and administrative law to harass and intimidate people who defend the rights of asylum seekers. The most prominent recent example ended in January 2026, when a court on the island of Lesbos acquitted 24 humanitarian workers of similar charges after a legal ordeal that lasted seven years. The European Parliament once called that the largest criminalization-of-solidarity case in Europe.

Despite that acquittal, Greece moved in the opposite direction. In February 2026, the Greek government passed a migration law that makes membership in a nongovernmental organization an aggravating factor in migration-related crimes, in some cases turning them into felonies with heavy penalties. The UN's former special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, said in a 2023 report that people working on migration in Greece had faced smear campaigns, threats, and the misuse of criminal law to a shocking degree, and has said the investigation of Dimitras and Olsen strongly appears arbitrary.

Why it matters to you

You may never set foot on a Greek island, but the principle on trial travels. If documenting what happens at a border and telling authorities where vulnerable people are can be prosecuted as organized smuggling, the chilling effect reaches every person who films, reports, or witnesses how migration is policed. Rights groups warn that the message to young activists is stark: keep quiet, or risk prison.

The trial's timing also matters. It opens as governments across Europe debate tougher migration enforcement, and as the people most affected — asylum seekers themselves — rarely get a seat in the courtroom. What happens on Rhodes will signal how far European states can go in using criminal law against the watchdogs who monitor their borders.

For now, the defendants' positions are clear. Olsen has denied the charges and, in his own writing, asked only that the Greek court be allowed to do its work while the wider question — how much room Europe leaves for human rights defenders who document its borders — stays in public view. Whether the prosecutors' reading or the rights groups' reading prevails will be decided in the weeks ahead on Rhodes.

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