Trial of Sarah Mardini and fellow defendants lifts lid on ‘farcical’ treatment of humanitarians, say campaigners
The Swimmers
“As on Tuesday she will not be attending on Friday,” said Zacharias Kesses, her Athenian lawyer, referring to proceedings that were cut short on Tuesday amid chaotic scenes in Mytilene’s courthouse that saw the presiding judge slam the bench as lawyers, talking over one another, called for the indictments to be annulled. “What has happened has been very traumatic for her but she is happy that, at last, the trial has begun.
Former aid worker Seán Binder, who is among the defendants on trial for espionage in Mytilene, the island’s port town, this week.Amnesty International has slammed the legal proceedings as being indicative of the lengths to which Greek authorities will go to deter volunteers helping asylum seekers at land and sea borders from which, increasingly, they have been violently repulsed.
The defendants had all signed up with the Emergency Response Centre International, among the plethora of NGOs that at the height of the crisis attracted thousands of youngto Lesbos, then a magnet for migrants making the perilous Aegean sea crossing from Turkey. With Mardini absent, it was Seán Binder, a German-born Irishman and trained rescue diver, also championed by rights groups, who was the subject of press photographers on Tuesday. The 29-year-old law graduate, similarly held for three months in pre-trial detention,after his arrest in late 2018, sat alongside other defendants on wooden seats beneath the bench as lawyers argued for the case to be thrown out citing procedural errors.
Greece’s centre-right government has described its migration policy as “strict but fair” and when asked about the Lesbos trial the Guardian was told it “would never comment” on a court case.
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