As a group of activists based mostly in Europe, we stand in solidarity with all the people criminalised for facilitating freedom of movement, and towards all the people on the move.
Over the past years, all over the EU and its externalised borders, thousands of people have been arrested and put on trial for exercising freedom of movement or for facilitating it. This process of criminalisation is the systematic result of racist laws and bordering practices, and it often affects the lives of criminalised people all over their lifetime.
Facing extremely long prison sentences based on arbitrary trials, people on the move accused of ‘smuggling’ or of ‘facilitating illegal immigration’ are a central target of the carceral violence of the border regime. Yet, they rarely receive the level of of support and solidarity as white EU activists who face criminalisation for sea rescue or solidarity acts. The separations and hierarchies between racialised and white people is created and maintained by the police, media and governments, in an effort to divide us.
The criminalisation of people on the move is too often invisible, and their voices are silenced through detention and imprisonment. This invisibilisation and silencing allows the authorities of the EU and it’s Member States’ to further violate their rights and to exercise the worst violence on them, even after their release.
All these forms of criminalisation and imprisonment are based on racist laws that lead to political trials. Their only aim is to reinforce the European states’ racist politics that kills people on the move, and to incarcerate those who survive and who resist this racist violence, silence and invisibility.
This repression targets all those who dream of, build and inhabit a world where people can move in freedom.
But we will continue to support any acts facilitating freedom of movement, and we will continue to support those defying borders on land and at sea.
