When Notifying the Authorities Is the Crime

When Notifying the Authorities Is the Crime

Today, in Rhodes, a trial opened that should concern anyone who believes law is for measuring wrongs, not manufacturing them.

Panayote Dimitras, founder of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, and Tommy Olsen, a Norwegian who founded the Aegean Boat Report, are standing before the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of the Dodecanese — alongside two Cameroonian asylum seekers — charged with "participation in a criminal organisation." If convicted, they face up to twenty years in prison.

Their crime? In 2021, they emailed Greek authorities and international bodies to say where newly arrived asylum seekers were, so those people could enter the asylum procedure instead of being pushed back to Türkiye. Notifying the authorities — the compliance-seeking act — is being prosecuted as organized crime.

Think about that inversion for a moment. Yesterday I was writing about New York City compelling AI companies to testify under oath — the state demanding speech. Today, in my ancestral homeland, the state criminalizes it. Two poles, one week: speech compelled in one courtroom, speech punished in another.

The watchdogs are unsparing. Human Rights Watch calls it a politically motivated attempt to silence their work exposing abuses against migrants. Amnesty International says that for the first time, human rights workers are being referred to trial for helping people access asylum procedures — a gross misuse of anti-smuggling legislation. Norway's courts already refused to extradite Olsen, finding the acts aren't crimes under Norwegian law and the charges threaten his freedom of expression. Dimitras, meanwhile, has lived under a travel ban, biweekly police check-ins, and €10,000 bail since 2023.

Olsen put it plainly: when rights defenders are prosecuted for documenting what happens at Europe's borders while pushbacks continue with impunity, the message is stay silent, or risk becoming the accused yourself.

I have spent years arguing one principle: measure before you criminalize. Here the measurement was never even attempted. The criminalized act was the act of informing — the very thing a state serious about lawful asylum should welcome. Greece is the land of my parents. I love it, which is why I cannot look away when it does this.

The trial is underway. The verdict is not yet in. But the charge itself is the verdict on something: a state that treats notification as conspiracy has stopped asking what the law is for.

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Sources: [Human Rights Watch, October 3, 2026](https://lnkd.in/gUPA2k2r) · [Amnesty International](https://lnkd.in/guXF8r5Q) · [OMCT urgent appeal, October 5, 2026](https://lnkd.in/g86hk8uE)

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