Twenty-four people affiliated with Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), a non-profit search-and-rescue group that operated on Lesbos from 2016 to 2018, face up to eight years in prison when trials begin on Thursday. .
He also faces felony charges including trafficking people, people belonging to a criminal group, and money laundering, which carries a sentence of 25 years in prison.
Amnesty International’s European director Nils Muizniaks said the allegations were “ridiculous”.
“This symbolic case shows how far Greek officials will go to stop people from helping refugees and migrants,” he said in a statement.
Human Rights Watch called the lawsuit “politically motivated”.
Among those to be prosecuted is Sarah Mardini, a Syrian refugee who took an overcrowded dinghy in Greece with her sister Yusra in 2015 at the height of Europe’s refugee crisis, and another 19 passengers to board their sinking boat. He was rescued by dragging him to the shore for four hours. ,
Mardini and another volunteer, Sean Binder, a German national, were arrested in 2018 and spent 107 days in pre-trial detention at a maximum security prison in Athens.
The two leave Greece after being released, and Binder is back despite his doubts about the trial.
“I didn’t think for a moment that trying to help someone at sea would get you jailed,” Binder told Reuters in Athens. “I’m afraid to go back to jail.”
He said he was handcuffed in prison to a man who had committed double murder by burning someone alive.
“It’s scary to go there again and I can’t believe that, just because there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing… I still don’t believe we’ll be found not guilty,” he said.
Mardini, who now lives in Germany, has been barred from re-entering Greece and will be represented by a lawyer.
Giorgos Kosmopoulos, a senior Amnesty campaigner, called on officials to drop the charges during a solidarity protest outside the Greek parliament, saying “it’s mind-boggling why someone can’t attend their own trial.”
Binder, the rescue diver, said he intended to volunteer only for a short period of time.
“It was not my plan to spend the rest of my life doing this, to be some kind of champion,” he said.
“If you see someone drowning you’ll do the same as me, you’ll raise a hand, get them out, and that’s the crime I’ve been accused of committing.”
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