{"id":214862,"date":"2025-12-04T10:58:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T10:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/214862\/"},"modified":"2025-12-04T10:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T10:58:11","slug":"kerry-lawyer-due-in-court-on-people-smuggling-charges-after-trying-to-rescue-refugees-from-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/214862\/","title":{"rendered":"Kerry lawyer due in court on people smuggling charges after trying to rescue refugees from sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Kerry humanitarian and lawyer is due in court on Thursday on people smuggling and other criminal charges after trying to rescue refugees from drowning in the sea.<\/p>\n

Se\u00e1n Binder is one of 24 defendants charged in connection with efforts to save refugees from drowning off the Greek island of Lesvos in 2018.<\/p>\n

They face charges of participation in a criminal organisation, people smuggling, and money laundering.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr Binder could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m expecting to be acquitted because we’ve done absolutely nothing wrong,\u201d Mr Binder, age 31, said ahead of the trial.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut you don\u2019t know what will happen.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mr Binder began volunteering for the search and rescue NGO ERCI on Lesvos in 2017, a lethal year for crossing the Mediterranean with more than 3,000 people reported dead or missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2018, the Greek authorities arrested Mr Binder, then age 24, and detained him for more than 100 days before releasing him on bail.<\/p>\n

Limbo<\/p>\n

Mr Binder has been trapped in limbo for the seven years since, with limitations on his career, unable to start a family, and having to save to potentially pay for an apartment in Greece so that his mother and partner could visit if he is jailed.<\/p>\n

But Mr Binder is confident that he will ultimately be acquitted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we were really the heinous criminals that the police accuse us of being, then wouldn’t they want us in prison as quickly as possible?”<\/p>\n

A major problem has been the delay in getting to trial, with multiple adjournments mostly due to procedural errors by the prosecution, Mr Binder said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Miring humanitarians in seven years of probable lawfare has had a chilling effect on others keen to help vulnerable people arriving in Europe.<\/p>\n

And the charges were almost certainly brought to provide this powerful deterrent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe uncertainty has scared people away from doing search and rescue,\u201d Mr Binder said.<\/p>\n

The search and rescue organisation he volunteered for ceased to exist as everyone involved was arrested.<\/p>\n

And targeting humanitarians for helping refugees was not isolated to the 24 defendants in Lesvos.<\/p>\n

Mr Binder knows of 143 people in similar situations across the EU, including a Swiss pastor who was to be prosecuted for allowing asylum seekers sleep in his church.<\/p>\n

“But people still have a right to seek asylum. That’s still the law. There’s still a right not to drown,” Mr Binder said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We still have the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which says we have an obligation to assist people in distress.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘Obligation to assist people’<\/p>\n

“The Maritime Convention specifically states we have an obligation to assist people regardless of what their passport, their visa says.”<\/p>\n

Mr Binder was born in Germany but moved to Castlegregory, Co Kerry, at the age of 5.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He studied in Trinity College Dublin and at the London School of Economics before training as a barrister.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When released from a Greek prison, he spent time with his mother in Togher, Cork. He is now practicing criminal law in London.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been horrifying to confront the hypocrisy of European border policy,” Mr Binder said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the one hand, we lecture the rest of the world about the European Convention on Human Rights and how strong Europe is in upholding fundamental rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yet, as soon as the responsibility comes to implement those in our own waters, they evaporate, meaningless. People are abandoned to drown.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Mediterranean Sea is the deadliest sea crossing in the world. At least 33,000 people, according to the UNHCR, drowned in the Mediterranean since 2015 as of September.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“But two weeks ago there was a drowning off the coast of Lesvos so that number has increased.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose aren’t an act of God or a freak of nature. The reason people are drowning in the Mediterranean is because we are letting them drown.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe European Union is one of the wealthiest economic groups in the world<\/a>. If we wanted to stop people from drowning, we could easily do so. We choose not to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are dying because of the policies we put into place.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coast guard officers are due to give evidence on Thursday in the first day of the trial before the Mytilene Court of Appeals in Lesvos, Greece.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Their testimony is key to the defence.<\/p>\n

\"Se\u00e1nSe\u00e1n Binder is confident that he will eventually be acquitted. File picture: Panagiotis Balaskas\/AP<\/p>\n

It is being alleged that Mr Binder and his fellow humanitarians refused to co-operate with the authorities when helping people at the Greek shore.<\/p>\n

But they have proof \u2014 through telephone records and coastguard accounts \u2014 that they communicated with the coast guard in relation to any rescues from the beaches of Lesvos.<\/p>\n

Mr Binder’s lawyer, Zac Kesses, said that they are ready to start the trial.<\/p>\n

The humanitarians face three \u201cextremely serious\u201d charges, Mr Kesses said \u2014 forming and participating in a criminal organisation; migrant smuggling; and money laundering.<\/p>\n

The last charge stems from the police assertion that ERCI was not a humanitarian organisation but criminal, so all funds it held were criminal.<\/p>\n

In Greece, anyone convicted of membership of a criminal gang or people smuggling must be imprisoned until any appeal.<\/p>\n

So if anything goes wrong, the defendants will end up in prison pending appeal, Mr Zesses said.<\/p>\n

Migrant smuggling carries a 10-year sentence per person smuggled.<\/p>\n

In Greece\u2019s case against the humanitarians, more than 100 people were allegedly smuggled, potentially bringing jail terms of more than 100 years.<\/p>\n

But practically in Greece the maximum sentence a person can serve is 20 years, Mr Kesses said.<\/p>\n

He expects the humanitarians to be acquitted.<\/p>\n

But the cases were brought with the goal of pushing humanitarians off Lesvos, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in 2018 there was a perception that the humanitarian agents were a pull factor in migrant smuggling,\u201d Mr Kesses said.<\/p>\n

Multiple criminal cases were brought against humanitarians to discourage volunteers from coming to provide humanitarian assistance, he said.<\/p>\n

A doctor from the US, a banker from the Netherlands, and a police officer from the Netherlands are also among the 24 facing trial this week.<\/p>\n

Those charged range in ages from their 20s to 78, Mr Kesses said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Kerry humanitarian and lawyer is due in court on Thursday on people smuggling and other criminal charges…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":214863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,27,13,14,6,56,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-214862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-courts","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-immigration","15":"tag-latest-news","16":"tag-latestnews","17":"tag-main-news","18":"tag-mainnews","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-top-stories","21":"tag-topstories","22":"tag-world","23":"tag-world-news","24":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115660947961198387","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}