Original article by Natalie Gruber republished from Open Democracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

I supported people who’d been violently pushed back from Greece to Turkey – and was accused of being a criminal spy

In October 2020, my colleague and I were sitting in a cafe in central Istanbul, unsure of what would come next. We were exhausted: physically and mentally tired from supporting the people being violently pushed back from Greece and Bulgaria to Turkey, documenting the violations, and fielding requests from journalists.

That morning, the apartment we had planned to move into had fallen through. Three weeks earlier, Turkey had cancelled the residence permits of two colleagues and given them just 24 hours to leave the country.

We were running out of funds, burnt out, and ill. Now, we had nowhere to live.

“What’s next?” I wondered.

My phone pinged. It was a message from Giorgos Christides, then the Greece correspondent for the German newspaper Der Spiegel. I called him back.

“You are one of them! One of the four!” he told me. He had sent a picture of the front page of a Greek newspaper. On it was a screenshot of our website and a letter from the police on Lesvos island that named our organisation, Josoor.

I can’t read Greek, but I understood what was happening. The article was following up on a press release issued by Greek police a week earlier, detailing a “secret operation uncovering a spy network” of four NGOs on Lesvos island. We had just been named as one of them.

I sat frozen as Giorgos translated the text. Espionage. Violation of state secrets. Forming a criminal organisation. Facilitation of illegal entry. Up to 35 years in prison.

How did we end up here?

Multiple crises at the border

The story starts seven months earlier, in March 2020. It had been a sleepless night: we’d been out in freezing temperatures, and our eyes were still stinging from the tear gas. The evening before, two colleagues and I had entered the closed military zone at the border to Greece near Edirne, northwest Turkey.

Our goal was to assess the feasibility of a civil society relief response to the crisis then unfolding at the border. We were three of around 180 volunteers who had met on a Facebook group for aid efforts in Greece, and we refused to just stand by and watch.

The situation was dire. Up to 20,000 people seeking protection were stranded in makeshift tents on the Turkish side. It was cold, and people had to queue for hours to receive a minimal amount of food from the Turkish disaster relief agency. There was no medical care available, and the area was regularly exposed to tear gas from both sides.

Many of those we encountered had been violently pushed back to Turkey by Greek officers, and even enlisted civilians. Two people had been shot dead.

We knew that the Turkish authorities had been obstructing organised relief before we entered the zone. But our scouting trip made it clear to us that they were also creating deliberately poor conditions. So this loose network of volunteers started distributing aid – food, clothes, sleeping bags, hygiene and first aid supplies – under the radar while also keeping the international media informed of what was going on. It was the beginning of Josoor’s work in Turkey.

Men, women and children were – and still are – arriving on Turkish land beaten, humiliated and robbed of all their possessions

The crisis we were responding to had been brewing for years. Turkey had long been threatening to ‘send’ the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey to Europe, in response to escalating tensions between the country and the European Union.

In the 2016 EU-Turkey agreement, the EU promised Turkey a €6 billion support package and visa-free travel for Turkish citizens. In exchange, Turkey promised to prevent asylum seekers from leaving its territory and to re-admit those who reached the Greek islands.

The deal was described by Amnesty International as an “abject failure”, corrosive for the EU’s human rights record, and “based purely on political convenience”. It turned people seeking protection into pawns for politics – and leverage in the hands of the Turkish government.

The agreement also led to a sharp increase in the frequency and violence of so-called pushbacks back to Turkey from Greece. This informal and illegal practice of collective expulsions had been documented at the land border for decades, but they had never been so systematic nor so violent.

Following the deal, they were also extended to the sea border. The Greek Coastguard (HCG) began disabling peoples’ dinghies and creating waves to push them back to Turkish waters. By 2020, their officers were puncturing inflatable dinghies, setting people adrift in overcrowded life rafts, and even firing live rounds at unarmed people.

But despite the obvious “political convenience” of the deal for Europe, it didn’t keep to the bargain. By 2019, the EU had only paid Turkey half the promised amount and no progress had been made regarding travel restrictions. It did, however, continue to put pressure on Turkey over its role in the Syrian civil war. Then came the last straw: 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in an airstrike in Idlib, northwest Syria, and Turkey said it could no longer cope with holding up its end of the deal with the EU.

On 28 February, 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made good on his threats: he announced that the border to Europe was open.

Launching a long-term relief response

Just weeks after we arrived at the border area, Covid-19 struck. After forcing thousands of people to the border and trapping them there, Turkish authorities suddenly ordered people to clear the area.

People scattered. Some returned to Istanbul or went somewhere else. Those who refused to leave were forced onto buses and kept in quarantine camps before being dropped off in various locations, and stranded without supplies during Turkey’s first nationwide lockdown.

One group sent us a video from the Aegean coast, saying they’d been told by their bus driver to “try to make it to Greece”. Turkish officers apparently told another group the same thing after they were stranded in a different spot.

As we did with all the information we received, we published this on social media in our daily update. The next day, we woke to Greek media headlines alleging that “Turkey sends Covid-infected migrants to Greece as a biological weapon of hybrid warfare”. This ‘news’ had also reached right-wing outlets, only they’d added: “according to Turkish spy organisation Josoor”.

Efforts to correct the narrative were futile – the damage was done. After just a month of operating in Turkey, Josoor was now on the radar.

In hindsight, this media frenzy should have worried and prepared us for what was to come. But we were fully occupied with the situation on the ground, trying to fill the massive gap in monitoring and support for border violence survivors.

We were no longer just a bunch of volunteers trying to sort out an emergency response. Organisational structures were established and our operations were growing. We started providing accommodation, clothing, food, and medical care. And we started taking testimonies to evidence the systematic fundamental rights violations committed by European forces.

Greek, Bulgarian, and EU border and coast guard agency (Frontex) officers continued their campaign of pushbacks following the events of March 2020. There were endless reports of inhumane and degrading treatment, arbitrary detention in appalling conditions, theft, forced undressing, sexualised violence, and torture. Men, women and children were – and still are – arriving on Turkish land beaten, humiliated and robbed of all their possessions.

We joined the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) and took our evidence and advocacy to the UN, EU, and member state levels. Josoor became a key source of information for international media, collaborating with outlets from 40 countries. But unbeknownst to us, this rapid success had already triggered a first of three secret criminal investigations.

The first warning signs

“We have a right to live,” said Farzad (a pseudonym) in a video livestreamed in June 2020. Alongside the unaccompanied 17-year-old were ten other children, four babies, and 18 adults from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Syria.

They had been drifting in a flimsy dinghy in the Aegean Sea for three days.

Independent search and rescue operations were effectively banned in the area. Greece’s Hellenic coast guard (HCG) was the authority in charge. But, according to Farzad, it was the coast guard itself that was responsible for their distress. He explained in his video how HCG officers had removed the dinghy’s engine, then used their boat to create waves to push the dinghy back into Turkish waters.

The video was picked up in an unexpected place. Runa Godø Sæther, a music teacher and single mother of three, was managing a Facebook page at the time, sharing posts of people on the move to a European audience from her small town in Norway.

Runa and I didn’t know each other, but we had talked online about collaborating on advocacy. She came across Farzad’s livestream and connected the boy to me, since she had no experience handling ongoing distress cases like this one.

Remarkably, Farzad’s boat eventually reached Lesvos. His desperate calls for help had reached a Turkish liaison officer aboard a German NATO ship, who pressured the crew to intervene and tow it to Lesvos.

I introduced him to some journalists when he arrived, and within a short time he had spoken to multiple media outlets about his ordeal. Two days after arriving, a UNHCR official warned him to stop speaking to the press – the police were beginning to take notice.

Farzad instantly cut all ties with journalists – but it was too late. When the others from his boat were transferred to Moria reception centre, Farzad was taken into police custody. He was held there for seven months. Initially, we had no idea why Farzad had been detained. Greek police only told his lawyer he was deemed “a threat to public security”, but never filed charges.

When the Greek press splashed the news of the police letter across their front page, the one that Giorgos had translated for me over the phone, it finally became clear.

The ‘criminal network’

“The Lesvos 35”, as we came to be known, included 32 members from four civil society organisations, one independent volunteer (Runa, the Norwegian music teacher), and two asylum seekers, including Farzad.

Of the four accused organisations, only one – Mare Liberum – actually operated on Lesvos. Registered in Germany, they shared an address with Sea Watch in Berlin, who had ceased operations in Greece four years prior but was still included in the case. Our organisation, Josoor, operated in Turkey.

The other accused organisation was FFM, a research society hosting the donation account for the real target: AlarmPhone. This network of volunteers from all around the Mediterranean runs an emergency hotline for people in distress at sea.

The investigation never aimed to uncover an ‘organised human trafficking network’. It sought to defame, discredit, deter, distract, and disable

The six-month investigation run by the Greek intelligence service, anti-terror unit and HCG resembled a poorly scripted spy movie. Over the course of the investigation, they recruited two asylum seekers, who they sent back to Turkey as “agents” to return to Greece. Then armed special forces conducted a dawn raid on Mare Liberum’s ship, confiscating all electronic devices and detaining the crew for several hours – before releasing them without interrogation.

Our lawyers also strongly suspected that our phones were tapped, making everyone who was now reaching out to us for support a potential target for authorities. And everything we said or wrote in private messages and calls could possibly come back to haunt us. This put immense psychological pressure on us and forced us to censor our communication.

Despite felony charges being announced, none of the 33 organisation members were ever arrested or called to testify. Some even continued to work on the island. Greece has a well-earned reputation of overusing pre-trial detention. Had the authorities believed their own claims – that an allegedly dangerous criminal network was spying on Greek authorities – they should, and I believe would, have arrested us.

Instead, they only leaked information to servile media, while high-ranking government officials, including Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, made numerous statements fuelling the defamation campaign.

I cannot quite put into words what this meant. On the one hand, we, the accused, knew full well that we had done nothing criminal at all, so it was hard to take the allegations seriously. But on the other hand, we were slandered and defamed, and our work was discredited. And even though it was absurd, we still faced the possibility of 35 years in prison, which is longer than I have lived.

For three years, seven months and 12 days, we faced the threat of prosecution. The constant anxiety of waiting to be summoned for trial ate away at me. Throughout this time, Greece was so geographically close to me, and a place very dear to my heart – but I couldn’t set foot in the country for fear of arrest.

That threat was finally lifted on 30 April 2024, when our lawyers received the only official communication about the case from the Greek state: a 16-page decision dropping all charges against us.

Like other cases targeting civil society organisations across Europe, this investigation never aimed to uncover an “organised human trafficking network” or to stop “spy games”. It sought to defame, discredit, deter, distract, and disable.

Defame us as a reliable source of information. Discredit our reports exposing human rights violations. Deter others from doing the same. Distract us from our work by forcing us to prepare a legal defence and campaign. Disable our operations through the financial and psychological strain of ongoing investigations.

We got close to quitting back then. But we also realised that being targeted so quickly and so viciously meant that our work so far had been successful. And every day we saw how those we had committed to support were dealt a much worse hand.

So despite the threats we continued for another two years. And each year brought another criminal investigation from Greece. The second case, which started in 2021, simply dissolved for us, but ended with severe consequences for other defendants.

Then, in May 2022 and with pressure mounting inside Turkey, the Greek media once again published claims of criminal investigations into an NGO network. This time, we were sure we were one of the accused. We tried to hang on, and for months we discussed our options.

But in August 2022, we made the difficult decision to dissolve Josoor. Not long after, another of the organisations caught up in the first case, Mare Liberum, also ceased their operations due to the pressure caused by the investigations.

Deterrence at all costs

The mental load of waiting for the day I’m summoned to defend myself against accusations of espionage is hard to describe. It was overwhelming knowing I was being constantly surveilled – sometimes in person in Turkey, and apparently digitally from Greece – while working to support people who had suffered unimaginable rights abuses at the EU border. I was propelled into burnout and PTSD.

For me, the proceedings are far from over. After we submitted a freedom of information request to Europol, the EU law enforcement agency, my co-defendants were told there was no personal information being held about them. But in May 2021, Europol denied my request on the grounds that it could cause “potential jeopardy to member state investigations”. Contacts of mine in the EU data protection authority told me it’s highly likely that Greece, and possibly Frontex, had reported me to the policing agency.

My subsequent complaint to the European Data Protection Supervisor, filed two years ago, remains unresolved, despite the conclusion of their investigation into my case earlier this year.

I was so burnt out that I was ready to accept the situation. But Statewatch and EDRi, who are engaged in crucial work on this issue, reached out to tell me they are eager to advance my case to the European courts, to seek redress for my criminalisation and wrongful entry into Europol’s databases.

Although it will be a long time before my name is cleared, the relief I felt once the charges against us had been dropped showed me just how much pressure I had been under.

Throughout these years, the EU and its member states have shown how far they will go in order to silence those who expose their crimes. And yet, we are only collateral damage. The real targets of all these criminalisation campaigns are those challenging the border regime simply by stepping across the arbitrary lines we have drawn.

Voluntarily or forced, people have moved from one place to another throughout human history. But particularly in this past decade, Europe’s only response to this simple, human phenomenon has been deterrence and externalisation.

Pushbacks are one hallmark of these brutal, costly and racially motivated policies. The criminalisation of migration is another hallmark, resulting in the widespread imprisonment of people seeking protection. By extension, authorities are also engaging in secondary criminalisation: targeting those stepping in where states fail, providing basic yet desperately needed support at Europe’s borders.

Within the Border Violence Monitoring Network, eight of the 14 organisations faced criminal proceedings across four European countries in 2022. Journalists, lawyers, doctors and other aid workers are increasingly being targeted as well.

The criminal proceedings had a huge toll on me. But as a white EU citizen, the price I paid was small – uncomparable to all those unjustly spending years or even decades in prison just for seeking protection. In the end, society as a whole pays a high price. The widespread erosion of the rule of law across Europe threatens nothing less than democracy itself – and the fundamental rights it has ensured for everyone.

Explore the rest of the series

This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.

• Caught in the net: how migration became a criminal offence Melissa Pawson, Vicky Taylor
• We saved lives at sea. So why did Italy detain our boat Nathan Akehurst
• Children prosecuted as adult ‘smugglers’ in UK, Italy, Greece Frey Lindsay
• Starmer’s counter-terror plan for migration woefully misses the mark Ruben Andersson
• Interview: I sought safety in the UK. I was sent to prison instead Samyar Bani, Melissa Pawson
• EU migration strategy: treat migrants like the mafia Lorenzo D’Agostino

Original article by Natalie Gruber republished from Open Democracy under under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

dizzy: Experiencing some problems posting with WordPress today, having to use a different browser to normal and it may look a little different. So what eh?