Category: Updates & News
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On 15. May 2024, A.A., a young man from Palestine, faced a trial on the Greek Island Rhodes. He, himself a refugee, forced to steer the boat at gun, was accused of smuggling more than 30 people in a boat from Turkey to Europe. Under Greek law, he was threatened with a decades-long prison sentence,…
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Following a three-week trial, Ibrahima Bah, a teenager from Senegal, has been convicted by an all-white jury at Canterbury Crown Court. The jury unanimously found him guilty of facilitating illegal entry to the UK, and by a 10-2 majority of manslaughter by gross negligence. This conviction followed a previous trial in July 2023 in which the jury…
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Since 2018, the number of people crossing the English Channel on ‘small boats’ in search of safety has risen year on year. As others have argued, including elsewhere on this blog, this is a manufactured ‘crisis’ of the British government’s own making. Decades of securitisation in the juxtaposed controls in Calais have continually forced people…
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An important aspect of bordering processes in Italy is to criminalise the facilitation of migration. The first notable instances date back to the 1990s, when people were fleeing political unrest and economic crisis in Albania. It is in these years that the term “scafista”, a derogatory term to describe migrant boat drivers, or captains, was…
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In 2002, EU Directive 2002/90/EC obligated each EU Member State to make it a criminal infraction to intentionally facilitate the unauthorised entry or transit of a person across a border – notably whether or not that person received any financial or material benefit to facilitate the crossing, and whether or not that person was a…
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From Human Rights Legal Project: Original article here Incredible news: for the first time in Greece, the Court acquitted 2 of our clients for the offense of facilitating the illegal entry of third country nationals, due to them receiving refugee status. The Court accepted our claims and applied Article 2(c) of Law 4251/2014 not only…