Greece: aid workers under pressure
The trial of 24 aid workers in Greece who worked for a humanitarian NGO on Lesbos has been adjourned only shortly after it began on Thursday. The aid workers are facing charges of human trafficking, money laundering and espionage. The climate in the country has also worsened for other activists such as sea rescue coordinator Iasonas Apostolopoulos.
Far-right rhetoric has normalised brutality
Asylum seekers are human beings, not just a security problem, web portal In stresses:
“We all know that 'illegal entry', which often involves risking their lives for those who attempt it, has long been the precondition for asserting the supposedly guaranteed right to asylum and humanitarian protection. ... Yet the arrival of refugees and migrants is not treated as an international humanitarian problem but as a kind of 'hybrid threat' and security issue. ... This, however, risks entrenching and normalising brutality at the borders of Fortress Europe, while solidarity is increasingly seen as a crime - which only confirms the rhetoric of the far right.”
A danger for Greece
News website Capital publishes an aggressive commentary by molecular biologist Theodoros Giannaros::
“The invasion of thousands of immigrants into Greece solves neither our demographic problem nor their problem, which is above all economic and existential. ... However, some grotesque members of dirty NGOs, well fed and well paid, certainly don't want us to know that. For that reason they try to mislead us with crocodile tears and their own arbitrary versions of a 'law of the sea' made in Turkey, to the point of saying that the obligation to rescue people who voluntarily enter our country without permission overrides the right to guard our borders.”