‘Hitting the right nail’: Refugee rescue group defiant as Greece targets it

To Greek authorities, he is the nefarious Norwegian mastermind of an international criminal organisation “operationally structured to commit repeated crimes”, which he secretly controls from his hometown of Tromso, north of the Arctic Circle.

To thousands of distressed asylum seekers on the Aegean, he is a hero who may have saved their lives by publicly alerting search and rescue authorities who might rather not have known of their whereabouts.

A Greek court will open trial proceedings on Tuesday against Tommy Olsen to decide who is right.

Olsen is the creator of Aegean Boat Report, an independent monitor of distressed vessels in the Aegean. When contacted, he alerts the Greek or Turkish asylum service and coastguard, depending on whose jurisdiction the refugees find themselves in.

The public prosecutor on the island of Kos, in the east Aegean, has accused Olsen of conspiring to smuggle refugees into Greece and to conceal them from authorities.

Olsen won’t be at the Kos court because Norwegian authorities thought the evidence against him too flimsy to grant extradition.

“They looked at what the Greek authorities described I had done, and they said, ‘There’s nothing illegal here. It’s actually protected activities,’” Olsen told Al Jazeera.

“When I inform Greek authorities of asylum seekers in their territory, on land, and give them their location, their names, and everything, that, supposedly, should be a good thing… But this the Greek authorities see as facilitating,” Olsen said.

‘Judicial harassment’

The case is important far beyond the fate of Olsen, 54, who could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Human rights organisations see it as Greece’s latest attempt to silence independent monitors of human rights abuses, for which the country has previously been convicted at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

“The ECHR asked us to confirm certain testimonies that featured in cases before it, and since then, those decisions have condemned Greece for pushbacks,” said Maria Gavouneli, head of the Greek National Committee for Human Rights, the country’s top independent human rights authority.

Pushbacks are illegal turnarounds of potential asylum seekers. Under the Geneva Convention of 1951, signatories, including Greece, are obliged to provide an asylum hearing to anyone who requests one.

Aegean Boat Report is one of a group of organisations which provide verified evidence for ECHR cases.

“We’ve asked NGOs in the field … to provide information about pushbacks. This is not hearsay. This is a signed witness statement that can stand up in court. We record these and we can help the witness go to the prosecutor,” Gavouneli told Al Jazeera.

Evidence provided by Aegean Boat Report has also helped shed light on at least two dozen instances of improper practices employed by the Hellenic Coastguard.

Last month, the Council of Europe, Europe’s principal human rights body, said retraining of Greek law enforcement officers and other measures “do not yet appear adequate to comprehensively address the ‘systematic practice of “pushbacks”‘ identified by the [ECHR], while serious concerns continue to be raised in this regard by a large number of different sources”.

Ultimately, Greece can face the suspension of European Union funding if it fails to provide “genuine and effective access to international protection procedures”.

That, said Olsen’s lawyer, is why Aegean Boat Report’s work is undesirable from the perspective of Greek authorities.

“The whole logic here is judicial harassment. They harass the organisations and humanitarians to get them away from the border so there can’t be any record of irregular or illegal coastguard practices,” Zacharias Kesses, the managing partner of Athens Legal Firm, told Al Jazeera.

Smuggling or humanitarian assistance?

Greek governments have long tried to prove that certain aid groups help to smuggle people into Greece.

In the last eight years, prosecutors have shut down two organisations by arresting their members and charging them with trafficking and espionage.

But in January, all 30 members of Emergency Response Centre International, a Greek search and rescue group, were acquitted of charges similar to Olsen’s. Sarah Mardini, a Syrian Olympic swimmer, was one of their members.

Smuggling charges against Mare Liberum, a German search and rescue group, were also shelved for lack of evidence this year.

Still, both organisations were shut down.

“They force you to stop doing what you’re doing and spend money to clear your name. It took Sarah Mardini eight years to be acquitted, with all the help she was receiving,” said Kesses, who has represented all three groups.

Despite the fact that there has never been a smuggling conviction, the suspicion persists in the minds of Greek officials.

Last February, the government passed a law that cuts off public funding to an entire aid group if any one of its members is merely accused of a felony.

Defending the bill in parliament, Minister of Migration Thanos Plevris said aid groups that receive funding cannot justify the use of volunteers.

“If you receive money, you cannot have volunteers. Your people get paid legally from government money and European Union money. They’re not volunteers,” Plevris said. “If they’re not getting paid, they’re using their access to rejected asylum seekers in camps. I don’t want them to say, ‘Don’t worry, meet me here at night and I’ll help you get to Athens.’”

‘My family is collateral damage’

Even though Greece doesn’t control any of Olsen’s funding, it has cut it off. Fearing reputational damage, his sponsors have ended support for Aegean Boat Report.

“The bills for one year for the lawyers is perhaps 10 annual budgets for Aegean Boat Report,” he said. Two weeks ago, he sold his car.

“I’m sitting with the invoices for 19,000 euros ($21,000), without any ability to pay them.”

Then there is personal cost. Olsen, a former kindergarten teacher who left his job to become a full-time aid coordinator on the island of Lesvos during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, hasn’t been on holiday with his family for years because he devoted all his time to refugees. Four of his five children have grown up and left home during that time.

“I feel really guilty for putting them through this, because I have done this with open eyes,” he said. “I would take responsibility for this, but I also have to take responsibility … for the collateral damage around me. And my family has been this collateral damage.”

Kesses believed this case would be dismissed or end in acquittal, like the others before it. Unlike them, it may not succeed in silencing Olsen. Aegean Boat Report still bears witness to the distress of asylum seekers on the high seas.

“The attacks from the Greek authorities give me a sense that I’m doing the right thing,” he said. “I’m hitting a nail that hurts… The more they act up, the more they try to get me, the more I understand that I’m hitting the right nail.”

In 1923, when the refugees coming from Turkiye were Greeks fleeing the burning of Smyrna, another Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen, engineered the world’s first population exchange between the two countries, probably saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Although he does not draw a parallel with Nansen, Olsen also sees his life as devoted to a greater cause.

“I’m defending the rule of law,” he said, “and defending human rights. It doesn’t concern a small group of people coming into Greek islands. It concerns all of us. It’s something that we pass on to our children.”