The Greece Migrant Trial That Could Jail Activists for 20 Years

Two human rights defenders go on trial on the Greek island of Rhodes on Tuesday for conduct that Human Rights Watch says amounted to emailing authorities about newly arrived asylum seekers. The Greece migrant trial could end with both men sentenced as members of a criminal organization.

Human Rights Watch identified the defendants as Panayote Dimitras, founder and president of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, and Tommy Olsen, the Norwegian national who founded Aegean Boat Report. Both men are being prosecuted alongside two Cameroonian asylum seekers on charges of forming or joining a criminal organization for profit, with the stated purpose of facilitating the entry and stay of foreign nationals in Greek territory, according to the group's October 3 statement. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison.

The charges turn on a simple activity. In 2021, the two men sent emails to Greek authorities reporting the whereabouts of people who had just arrived on the islands by boat, so those arrivals would be registered in the asylum procedure rather than intercepted and forced back across the sea, the World Organisation Against Torture reported. Prosecutors read that same conduct as smuggling. The indictment, according to Human Rights Watch, seeks to criminalize the act of alerting officials and international bodies that asylum seekers have arrived.

Neither defendant has been able to prepare a normal defense. Olsen lives in Norway, where an appeals court in May rejected Greece's request to extradite him through a European Arrest Warrant, finding that the acts described by Athens are not crimes under Norwegian law and that handing him over would create a real risk of violating his freedom of expression, according to Human Rights Watch. Because Greece has kept its arrest warrants active, Olsen would be detained the moment he landed in Greece to face court, so the Greece migrant trial may proceed with one defendant tried in absentia. Dimitras, who lives in Greece, is not in detention but cannot leave the country under a travel ban.

Why Norway refused to hand Olsen over

The Norwegian ruling matters because a European court examined the exact behavior Greece calls criminal and concluded it was lawful. Assisting someone to start an asylum procedure is protected by international treaties, the court found, a point that legal observers say could weigh on how the Rhodes judges read the indictment. Olsen has argued publicly that his work over nearly nine years at Aegean Boat Report, documenting arrivals, people in distress at sea, disappearances, and pushbacks, repeatedly contradicted official accounts of what happens at Greece's borders, according to his own published account of the case. He denies the charges.

Europe's own courts have already weighed in on the underlying practice. The European Court of Human Rights has characterized violent pushbacks by Greek authorities as systematic, a finding that Human Rights Watch cited as context for why the two men's documentation work mattered. The Greece migrant trial will test whether documenting border practices can be punished as organized crime.

A pattern that keeps repeating

Rights organizations say this prosecution follows a pattern. In January, a Greek court on the island of Lesbos acquitted two dozen humanitarian workers of similar charges after what Human Rights Watch described as a devastating seven-year legal ordeal. Despite that acquittal, Greece did not change course: in February, the government passed a migration law making membership in a nongovernmental organization an aggravating circumstance in migration-related offenses, in some cases elevating them to felonies, according to Human Rights Watch.

In a 2023 report to the Human Rights Council, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders stated that people working on migration in Greece, including lawyers, humanitarian workers, volunteers, and journalists, had faced smear campaigns, threats, attacks, and the misuse of criminal law to a shocking degree. The special rapporteur later said the criminal investigation against Dimitras and Olsen strongly appeared to be arbitrary.

Amnesty International took the harshest line. Dinushika Dissanayake, the organization's deputy regional director for Europe, said the charges represent "a gross misuse of anti-smuggling legislation" that is "not backed by evidence," adding that this is the first time human rights workers have been referred to trial for helping people access asylum procedures. "Construing this as 'smuggling' is not only a distortion of international and domestic law but a dangerous vilification of NGOs' valuable work," Dissanayake said, according to Amnesty's statement ahead of the Greece migrant trial.

What happens when the trial opens

The case will be heard by the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of the Dodecanese in Rhodes, according to the World Organisation Against Torture. If Olsen is convicted without being present, international law, including the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Greece is a party, would entitle him to a fresh hearing on the merits if he later returns to Greece, Human Rights Watch noted. A retrial years later is little consolation when a travel ban, an active arrest warrant, and drawn-out proceedings have already frozen a person's life.

For a generation that grew up filming everything, the stakes of the Greece migrant trial are hard to miss. The two defendants were not accused of steering boats or forging papers. They were accused of sending emails, taking notes, and telling the truth in public. Similar debates are flaring elsewhere: South Africa's recent migrant registration deadline stoked two days of fear among migrant communities, while Iraq's detainee trials show how quickly courtrooms can become life-or-death arenas when states write the charges.

Whether the Rhodes court convicts or acquits, the Greece migrant trial will send a signal far beyond the Aegean. If helping asylum seekers navigate the legal system can be prosecuted as organized crime, every volunteer, journalist, and activist working at Europe's borders has learned what a paper trail can cost. Rights groups say the case should be dropped; on Tuesday, the judges get their say.