The Trial That Never Should Have Been:

Some Reflections on the Criminalisation of Solidarity and the Role of the Anthropologist

By Maja L. Johnston

It’s the 15th of January, and it’s nine am. It’s a calm Seán who greets me at the top of the stone steps outside the small courthouse in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesvos in Greece. Well, as relaxed as one can be when heading into a courtroom to give testimony for the first time on felony charges after a seven-year wait. Compared to last court appearance in December he is not wearing a full-on suit but dark grey trousers, a grey suit jacket, and a white shirt sticking out under a grey jumper. A few of us are waiting for him and the others to arrive, and after saying hello and talking to some people, he comes up behind me and the person I am with, and says ”Please forgive me,” with a warm smile. He is referring to the confusion with the airport pick-ups the night before, which ended with me just grabbing a taxi. We hug, and I laugh and say, ”I’m sure I can do that”.

Seán Binder is an Irish-German former search-and-rescue volunteer, now a lawyer, and we met for the first time back in the spring of 2024, when he was a guest at a meeting I helped organise. He is one of 24 humanitarians who were arrested in 2018 and risked 20 years in prison on charges of membership of a criminal organisation, fraud, money laundering, and smuggling (facilitation of irregular entry), and, together with a few of the other defendants, he spent over 100 days in pre-trial detention. What Seán and the other did, however, was to save lives. They did what the government didn’t do. They were part of a Greek NGO named Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI). They looked and listened for boats and people in distress in the Aegean Sea, part of the Mediterranean Sea, informed the coastguard and assisted people at risk of drowning. The date for their first court appearance kept getting pushed and cancelled for various reasons. One time, they showed up in court only to find there were no translators available. This resulted in the trial being postponed until further notice. All together, they appeared for their court hearing twice before the third and fourth hearings in December and January just past, which I attended. Seán and the others see this as a deliberate tactic by the Greek authorities to scare others from continuing search-and-rescue on the island.

How do we, as people and anthropologists, navigate the border between what’s right and wrong? What if what’s legal isn’t always right, or what is made illegal is not wrong? I have spent the last few years reflecting a lot on what this targeting and criminalisation mean for the people committing acts of solidarity and for the people who are affected, and sometimes pay with their lives, because of the lack of search and rescue outside the coast of Lesvos, for example. But until I started conducting fieldwork for my master’s thesis among and with students in the Swedish student movement for Palestine, I hadn’t thought about what that entails for me as an aspiring anthropologist. If, let’s say, one day the university made it illegal to demonstrate on campus, would I stop participating in the demonstration? What happens when acts of solidarity, humanitarian work or peaceful activism become criminalised? And how would a self-proclaimed human rights activist deal with that and the role of being an anthropologist as well?

This text is my attempt to share some reflections on the idea of people, and specifically anthropologists and activists, questioning who decides what is ”criminal” and what is not, and how to navigate when these are changing, arguably for the worse. I draw on my own experience observing the trial of Seán and the other rescue workers as well as my research on the student movement for Palestine.

For this issue of Antroperspektiv, the question of who gets to determine ”criminality” and ”illegality” was posed. And the question of whether we are entering a time that calls for ”renegade” anthropologists. First of all, I must admit, I had to look up the word ”renegade.” It’s not a word I had heard much in use. Renegade = rejecting or abandoning conventional behaviour by disrupting. Aren’t all forms of protest and activism meant to be disruptive in some form? Disruptive to an order one does not agree with? Violent or not.

On this theme, I asked my British-born husband, who was busy washing some plates in our kitchen, what he thinks when he hears the word renegade. He stopped, somewhat surprised by my question, turned around, looked at me, gave me a hint of a smile and thought for a second. ”Outside of the law?” He replied. But he then corrected himself and said, ”Or not always just outside of the law, maybe like a disruptor or perhaps someone outside of the norm”.

I like that..…a disruptor… When I arrived on the island of Lesvos for the first time in December of 2025, as part of a team sent by Amnesty Sweden to observe and report from the first days of the trial in December, I was shocked to realise how close Turkey was, almost reachable, separated by a small but deadly stretch of water. It made me think of Jason De Leon and his book ”The Land of Open Graves” from 2015, and how he talks about the desert along the Mexico/US border in Arizona being turned into a tool of boundary enforcement and a strategic killer of people attempting to cross it. He talks about a system of ”prevention through deterrence” and how this structural violence is embedded in state and federal law infrastructure. Just as people are pushed out into more dangerous parts of the desert, increased control by the European States of the sea border is creating a more dangerous route available to migrants. What are people to do when there are no safe and legal routes? People I talked to on the island explained that many cross in the middle of the night or in stormy weather, as there are fewer coastguards out trying to stop them before they reach European waters. That’s why the volunteer rescue workers worked at night. Listening for screams of help

As I and the other trial observer stood outside our hotel by the beautiful and calm harbour of Lesvos, the director of Amnesty Belgium’s Flemish branch, Wies De Graeve, told us:

“What Seán did was helping people in need, he was saving lives. He did what every one of us would hope to do in those circumstances back in 2017 with people arriving on the shores of Europe in the search for security and safety…What we see is that solidarity is on trial, and unfortunately, it’s a trend we see across Europe. We see this trend of criminalisation of solidarity across Europe. We see it in Italy…we see it in Malta…We see it in France, where people who help people on the move are criminalised and prosecuted instead of being supported by the government”

Jump forward one month. As everyone entered the courthouse on that last day in January, family, journalists and observers took a seat on the wooden chairs that lined the back half of the room, whilst the defendants and their lawyers sat before the judges and prosecutor who were hidden behind a raised podium and glass walls. A leftover from Covid, I presume. Seán’s mum and partner were sitting just behind me, and it was just a wooden railing dividing the people on trial from us in the ”audience”. I thought back to the last time I was there, at the start of December 2025, and how the mood was a lot lighter this time around. There was almost a feeling of calm. Several people I talked to believed the prosecution did not have a case, after hearing some of their witnesses’ testimonies in December.

The picture of Jesus in his gold frame still hung above the judges on the otherwise white, empty wall, framed by two large, barred windows on either side. The courtroom police walked around the room, making sure no one took pictures or brought drinks into the room. In December the trial lasted only two days and was then pushed to the 15th of January. There was so much unknown on that first day, you could cut the tension in the air with a knife. It didn’t help that, back then, the appeal case before Seáns and the others was a man charged with smuggling. As this man, who was fleeing war, could not afford the crossing fee, he was put in charge of steering the boat. His appeal took 15 minutes, and he was sentenced to 8 years.

Thinking back to my own research on the student movement, how did we get to a point where students peacefully protesting are met with a heavy police presence at their own university? I think back to when a teacher I met called the students I was going to conduct research with a ”fairly controversial group of students”. Who did they mean? Are all the students controversial? All the students involved in the movement across four cities in Sweden in different capacities? Are all those people controversial? Why? And most interesting perhaps, controversial to whom? When does it become controversial not to speak up against something wrong? When is the tipping point of ”non-renegade” behaviour becoming ”the wrong side of history”? I didn’t feel comfortable confronting the teacher then and there and asking what they meant. Not very renegade of me, I know.

My former boss, who works in human rights and activism, asked me the other month how my studies were going with the research I’m doing on the Palestine solidarity student movement. I told her that I had just found out about the label activist anthropologist, and, to her delight, I told her I was sold. Once an activist, always an activist? The term activist anthropology, according to Bodirsky (2022), refers to a researcher who utilises their anthropological scholarship to produce knowledge while simultaneously engaging in a particular political struggle or collaborating with a specific political group. Then what happens if, let’s say, this group gets criminalised? Let’s say you are conducting research with someone like Seán or the others, conducting search-and-rescue work, who suddenly gets criminalised and convicted by a governing structure for just saving lives at sea. Would the ”betrayal” not be not continuing to do research with them? Willow and Yotebieng argue that when it comes to mixing activism and anthropology, ”…we have a moral imperative to do something, but considerable debate surrounds what that something should be” (2020, p. 2).

Let’s return to Lesvos. It is important to celebrate the good things in life. At around 20:15 on the 15th of January, after a seven year wait and an almost 11 hour long court day, apparently a time unheard of in the Greek legal system, many noted, the courthouse erupted into loud cheering and clapping as all 24 defendants were found innocent. Among the defendants who were acquitted were Nassos Karakitsos and Sara Mardini. Sara, whose life story was made famous through the movie ”The Swimmers”, herself fled the war in Syria and arrived on Lesvos in 2015. They were all found innocent by both the judges and the prosecutor, after having waited almost 8 years. Everyone in the court was smiling and hugging, with some hurrying out to get a good shot of the now-declared innocent people exiting the building. After waiting outside with other news reporters, NGO workers, friends, and family, some of them exit. After a while, Seán stood with Sara, Nassos, and two other defendants.

Nassos started off speaking and after a few minutes, after she had wiped away some tears, Sara began to hold her speech by saying: ”Saving human lives is not a crime. If there are people at home who want to be and do the work that we are doing, we encourage you to go out, because we didn’t do anything illegal…”

She took a pause and continued,”…and if helping people is a crime, we are all criminals”

Cheers, whistles and applause erupt. Another defendant followed her speech, and then it was Seán’s turn:

”I am personally upset that our holiday on the Greek island comes to an end. I was looking forward to 20 years in the sunshine. No, honestly, what I feel like is that this was incredibly stupid. We have waited seven years for what? To have it proven that WhatsApp isn’t an illegal application? To have it proven that when Sara fundraises for a laundry machine, she isn’t money laundering? To have it known that when we do search and rescue, it isn’t smuggling. We shouldn’t have to wait seven years for that. That should have taken 30 minutes for the police commander to have spoken to the coast guard office to have that verified. And in those seven years we have had to wait, people have drowned, we have spent tens of thousands of euros. For nothing. For this stupid end to this stupid trial. Obviously, I am happy that we won, but we were always going to win. But at what fucking cost? What a fucking waste. So, I am very happy but also very weirdly upset and sad about it. ”

Yes, it all does seem so stupid. Solidarity with people being killed or attempting to do search and rescue work should not be an illegal act, and I am glad they got acquitted. But what is the effect of this? Well, since their arrest, there has been no volunteer search-and-rescue work on the coast of Lesvos, for almost eight years. How many people have drowned? And what is happening with all the other cases of people being criminalised for their solidarity? Sean’s case is not a single case and there are currently hundreds of cases in which other European states are criminalising acts of solidarity or peaceful activism.

The day after the trial ended, everyone was recovering from the celebration the night before; there was definitely a lot of delicious food and drinks consumed. And let’s not forget the very cold night swim. Totally worth it in case you were wondering, nothing better than a swim to celebrate a win. We win, we swim, as Seán said. I met Seán down by the harbour, next to the Statue of Liberty. Yes, they have one as well, not as big as its sister in New York, but powerful still. I tried to take in the moment. It was over. So many years wasted in limbo. So many people drowned, waiting for help that never came. As we slowly walked back into town along a sunny harbour, we laughed, talked about our families, how beautiful Lesvos was and how beautiful the people were, but also what’s next. I asked him what he felt now, the day after, did it feel real that it was over? He took a deep breath and then said, ”Yes, but also not really. I guess I haven’t processed it yet.” He also explained that he felt upset that it had taken so long. As the prosecution didn’t have anything, how could it have taken so long?

When rules and laws change, but also attitudes among some, of what was once legal now instead gets criminalised, are we as anthropologists or academics supposed to change our beliefs as well? Even if we see it as morally wrong?

I think of instances of solidarity, humanitarian work or peaceful activism. Like the student in Sweden whose student union called the police on her after she organised a peaceful demonstration in the University’s food hall, and was later denied Swedish citizenship because of the police report attached to her name. Even if the police report was later dropped, the reason cited by the immigration authorities was that having the report open at the time they reviewed her case meant she didn’t comply with ”an honourable way of life ”. Or the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, living in New York in the US, who has previously been arrested by the authorities and threatened with deportation for his peaceful activism in solidarity with Palestine at his University, has now been issued a deportation order to Algeria. He is Palestinian.

Moreover, I think of the message from Seán, Sara and the others: ”Saving lives is not a crime”. Still, people get prosecuted for doing just this.

If I believe there is a need for citizens, students, activists or organisations to keep disrupting, being renegades, and speaking up against the criminalisation of solidarity, why would I, in my role as anthropologist, be an exception to this? With the trend we see across Europe, this criminalisation of solidarity and peaceful activism, I would argue we all need to disrupt a bit more, and that includes me. After all, I would follow in the footsteps of many renegade or activist anthropologists before me, including Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, David Graeber and Jeffrey S Juris.

In this text, I have shown you some of the very real individual and structural consequences when humanitarian work, solidarity with people on the move or peaceful activism becomes criminalised. Secondly, I have shared some reflections on the role of the anthropologist when what is made illegal is not always wrong. Lastly, I will end this essay with another photo, which I can now say with a bit more confidence that I might be good at, and quote from Seán: ”Helping people isn’t criminal, helping people is an obligation, not just a moral obligation, but a legal obligation and a responsibility we have under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to render assistance to people in distress”

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References:

Bodirsky, K. 2022. “Activist Anthropology”. Ch. 33 In James G Carrier (ed.), A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing 

De León, J 2015, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press, California. 

Willow, A.J. and Yotebieng, K.A. (2020). Anthropology and Activism. Routledge 

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