When Notifying the Authorities Is the Crime

 When Notifying the Authorities Is the Crime

The trial was supposed to open in Rhodes last week. It didn't — at the defence's request, the court postponed it to April 6, 2027. The postponement changes nothing about what should concern anyone who believes law is for measuring wrongs, not manufacturing them. If anything, it sharpens it: more than five years after the acts in question, the accused are still living under the case.

Panayote Dimitras, founder of the Greek Helsinki Monitor, and Tommy Olsen, a Norwegian who founded the Aegean Boat Report, were to stand before the Three-Member Court of Appeal for Felonies of the Dodecanese — Dimitras in person, Olsen tried in absentia — 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.

Dimitras put the delay in plain terms. The case, he said, "suffers from a very large number of procedural illegalities" which the judicial authorities ignored, "determined to drag us to court more than five years after the facts, despite case law of acquittals by this same court, and by other courts, in almost identical cases."

Think about that inversion for a moment. Earlier this month, New York City compelled AI companies to testify under oath — the state demanding speech. In my ancestral homeland, the state criminalizes it. Two poles, one month: 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. Former UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders Mary Lawlor says the investigation "strongly appears" arbitrary. 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 — yet Greece's European Arrest Warrant against him remains active. Dimitras, meanwhile, has lived under a travel ban, biweekly police check-ins, and €10,000 bail since 2023 — measures that continue through the postponement.

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 will wait until April. The charge will not wait to do its work: 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://www.hrw.org/news/2026/10/03/greece-rights-defenders-on-trial) · [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2026/10/olsen-and-dimitras-face-trial/) · [OMCT urgent appeal, October 5, 2026](https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/greece-migrants-rights-defenders-tommy-olsen-and-panayote-dimitras-to-face-trial-on-6-october) · [Statewatch, October 2026](https://statewatch.org/news/2026/october/greece-rights-defenders-on-trial-for-supporting-refugees-and-migrants/) · [Humanists International, October 6, 2026](https://humanists.international/2026/10/escalating-judicial-harassment/) · [Fair Trials, October 7, 2026](https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/tommy-olsens-trial-in-rhodes-postponed-to-april-2027/) · [European Roma Rights Centre, October 15, 2026](http://www.errc.org/news/greece-postpones-show-trial-of-roma-rights-defender-panayote-dimitras-until-2027)

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