Here is a job description. When asylum seekers are in trouble on the Aegean, or have landed somewhere on a Greek island, you find out where they are. Then you tell the authorities, publicly, with locations and sometimes names, so that somebody official has to deal with them. If they are in Turkish waters you tell the Turks, and if they are in Greek territory you tell the Greeks. That’s it. You run the whole thing from a laptop in northern Norway.
Here is how a Greek prosecutor describes the same job: the work of the mastermind of an international criminal organisation “operationally structured to commit repeated crimes,” which he secretly controls from Tromso, north of the Arctic Circle. That is the case against Tommy Olsen, the 54-year-old founder of Aegean Boat Report, whose trial opens on Tuesday, as John T Psaropoulos reported for Al Jazeera. The public prosecutor on Kos accuses him of conspiring to smuggle refugees into Greece and of concealing them from the authorities. If convicted he could get up to 20 years.
He isn’t alone. According to the FIDH and OMCT’s Observatory, his co-defendants are Panayote Dimitras, founder of Greek Helsinki Monitor, and two Cameroonian asylum seekers, all charged with “forming or joining for profit and by profession a criminal organization with the purpose of facilitating the entry and stay of third country nationals into Greek territory,” over incidents in 2021 and 2022 off Kos and Farmakonisi. Human Rights Watch has also condemned the prosecution. There is a small disagreement over the venue: Al Jazeera puts the hearing at the Kos court, while Norway’s ABC Nyheter reports that it begins on Rhodes.
The Greek side of the story is worth reading closely. ProtoThema, a Greek outlet, reported that prosecutors also accuse Olsen of espionage and of taking part in a smuggling network running from the Turkish coast. And it described the group as accused of passing data and arrival locations to the Greek authorities so that migrants could be moved to reception camps and apply for asylum. Read that sentence again. The alleged crime is telling the state where people are, so that the state can do what the 1951 Geneva Convention obliges it to do and give an asylum hearing to anyone who asks for one. Olsen makes the same point, a bit more wearily:
When I inform Greek authorities of asylum seekers in their territory, on land, and give them their location, their names, and everything, that, supposedly, should be a good thing… But this the Greek authorities see as facilitating.
Norway was not persuaded either. Olsen was arrested at home on a Greek warrant, and in May a Norwegian appeals court refused to extradite him. “They looked at what the Greek authorities described I had done, and they said, ‘There’s nothing illegal here. It’s actually protected activities,’” he told Al Jazeera. So he will not be in court. According to the FIDH, the Greek warrants are still in force, which means flying to Greece to defend himself would mean being arrested on arrival.
Why a record is expensive
If Olsen were really smuggling people into Greece, the strangest part of his method would be telling the Greek coastguard about it. What the alerts do produce is a record: a timestamped, public note that people were in a particular place at a particular time. If those people later turn up back in Turkish waters, somebody has a question to answer.
Those questions have consequences. Greece has already been condemned at the European Court of Human Rights over pushbacks, which are illegal turnarounds of people who might claim asylum. Maria Gavouneli, who heads the Greek National Committee for Human Rights, said the court asked her body to confirm testimonies, and that it gets them from groups in the field: “This is not hearsay. This is a signed witness statement that can stand up in court.” Aegean Boat Report is one of those groups, and its evidence has helped expose at least two dozen cases of improper practice by the Hellenic Coastguard. Last month the Council of Europe, which reviewed the pushback case at a September meeting, said Greece’s measures “do not yet appear adequate to comprehensively address the ‘systematic practice of “pushbacks”’” identified by the court. In the end Greece could lose European Union funding if it fails to provide “genuine and effective access to international protection procedures.”
So a record has a price, potentially in EU money, and the cheapest way to stop paying it is to have fewer records. That is the theory of Olsen’s lawyer, Zacharias Kesses of Athens Legal Firm: “The whole logic here is judicial harassment. They harass the organisations and humanitarians to get them away from the border so there can’t be any record of irregular or illegal coastguard practices.”
The process is the penalty
The record on these prosecutions is clear. In the past eight years Greek prosecutors have shut down two organisations by arresting members on trafficking and espionage charges. In January, all 30 members of Emergency Response Centre International, among them the Syrian Olympic swimmer Sarah Mardini, were acquitted of charges similar to Olsen’s. Smuggling charges against the German group Mare Liberum were shelved for lack of evidence in 2024. There has never been a smuggling conviction. Both groups shut down anyway. “They force you to stop doing what you’re doing and spend money to clear your name,” said Kesses, who represented both. “It took Sarah Mardini eight years to be acquitted.”
Last February Greece made the mechanism explicit, passing a law that cuts public funding to a whole aid group if any one member is merely accused of a felony. Accused, not convicted. A prosecutor’s charge sheet is now a funding decision. Defending the bill, Migration Minister Thanos Plevris said: “If you receive money, you cannot have volunteers. Your people get paid legally from government money and European Union money. They’re not volunteers.” Unpaid helpers, he suggested, might be telling rejected asylum seekers, “meet me here at night and I’ll help you get to Athens.”
Greece doesn’t fund Aegean Boat Report, but the law didn’t have to apply. Olsen’s sponsors, worried about their reputations, pulled out on their own. He says a year of legal bills runs to perhaps 10 times the group’s annual budget. He is sitting on invoices for 19,000 euros ($21,000) that he cannot pay, and two weeks ago he sold his car. In other words, one year of defending the work costs about as much as a decade of doing it.
There is also a cost that can’t be invoiced. Olsen, a former kindergarten teacher, left his job to coordinate aid on Lesvos during the 2015-16 refugee crisis. He hasn’t taken a family holiday in years, and four of his five children have grown up and left home in that time. “I feel really guilty for putting them through this, because I have done this with open eyes,” he said. “And my family has been this collateral damage.”
Kesses expects dismissal or acquittal, like the other cases. Olsen says the reports will keep going whatever happens. “The more they act up, the more they try to get me, the more I understand that I’m hitting the right nail,” he said. “I’m defending the rule of law.”
If he wins, a Greek court will have formally established that telling the Greek coastguard where people are is not a crime. That would at least go on the record.