Mohanad was 15 years old when he was arrested by the Greek authorities in November 2022 after arriving in Crete on a vessel that had departed from Libya. He has now been charged with smuggling 476 people and is awaiting trial later this year.
He is one of hundreds of people, including children and people travelling with their families, who have been arrested under Greece’s harsh anti-smuggling law that came into force in 2014 with jail sentences of up to 25 years.
Lawyers have reported that the trials of smugglers are riddled with procedural flaws and lack of evidence. It is often the most vulnerable who will steer the boat, they say, including men who agree to do it in return for a reduction in the price of passage for their family members. Arrests are arbitrary, they claim, if it is unclear who controlled the boat.
The criminalisation of refugees and asylum seekers is also useless in disrupting smuggling networks, say NGOs and legal experts, as the real smugglers are not usually on the boat.
Last year, an Afghan refugee was awarded €15,920 (£13,660) in compensation after being wrongly accused of people smuggling. He had served more than two years of a 50-year jail sentence after being singled out as the person steering the vessel, say lawyers, because he happened to be standing next to its wheel. The real culprits had abandoned the boat much earlier.
In Mohanad’s case, his father, Hassan, a fisher from Egypt who was travelling on the same boat, was also arrested and accused of having acted for profit after reportedly agreeing to take care of some tasks on board to help pay the fee. He was sentenced in March 2023 to 280 years in prison. (Despite the nominal length of these sentences, the maximum time prisoners can serve is between 20 and 25 years with options for earlier release.)
His now 16-year-old son Mohanad is facing the same charges: smuggling for profit, endangering the passengers’ lives and being part of a criminal organisation. Even though he is still a minor, he could go to prison for up to eight years, according to his lawyer Maria Flouraki, who says “the real smuggler who took the money is rarely on the boat”.
In Greece, controlling the boat or driving the car facilitating unauthorised entry is a criminal offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison for each person transported. The penalty can be higher depending on additional charges, such as endangering the lives of passengers if the boat gets into distress.
Those imprisoned for smuggling now constitute 20% of Greece’s prison population, with more than 2,000 people jailed as of February 2023, according to data released by the Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection.
The ministry did not respond to requests for more information, but earlier this year, the Greek migration minister, Dimitris Kairidis, reiterated the importance of its policy of tackling smuggling in a meeting with the EU.
In another case, Homayoun Sabetara, who had fled Iran, was arrested in September 2021 and charged with smuggling because he had driven himself and seven others across the Turkey-Greece border. According to Sabetara, he was coerced into driving the car by the smuggler who abandoned them in the woods near the border. He was given an 18-year sentence.
People accused of smuggling are considered guilty from the outset and convicted on thin evidence, activists and lawyers claim. “There are only some testimonies of passengers that saw my client distributing the food and water, that’s all,” says Flouraki. The written testimony of a coastguard officer might be enough for a conviction, she adds.
Most of those charged with smuggling do not have access to legal support until the day they go to court, says Dimitris Choulis, a lawyer with the Human Rights Legal Project on the Greek island of Samos. The assigned public defender will only see their file shortly before the trial.
Julia Winkler works with the NGO Borderline Europe and has monitored dozens of smuggling cases in Greece over the past five years. She says that in more than two-thirds of the cases she has seen, the main prosecution witness was absent, rendering cross-examination impossible – a violation of fair trial standards. She also says that some people have waited several months in pretrial detention without knowing why because all the papers they have received or signed are in Greek.
Last month, Sabetara’s trial appealing against his 18-year sentence was postponed for another five months to allow the court time to locate the key witness, who was neither present at the initial trial nor at an appeal hearing.
“The decision to postpone the trial to hear the key witness can make the trial fairer and also acknowledges flaws in the first instance trial,” says Choulis. A motion put forward to release Sabetara for the time being given his fragile health was rejected.
Mohanad currently lives in accommodation for unaccompanied minors on Crete, but Flouraki says that he has suffered badly from the imprisonment of his father, the separation from the rest of his family and the uncertainty about his future. In February, his trial was postponed to take place in November.
