When solidarity becomes a crime
“Criminalisation of solidarity” refers to the increased policing and investigation as criminals of people who help migrants, including through search and rescue operations, reception activities and the provision of food, housing and services.
For seven years, this was (and still is) the reality the volunteers of the search-and-rescue vessel Iuventa 10 had to endure for saving and assisting 23000 lives in danger in distress in the Mediterranean Sea between 2016 and 2017.
This case, known as “Iuventa Case”, has become a key reference point exposing EU’s double standard, On this Human Rights Day, we reflect on how the EU claims to defend these rights while at the same time criminalising those who strive to uphold them.
The volunteers of the Iuventa operated under the coordination of the Italian Maritime Rescue Centre, conducting search-and-rescue operations in line with international maritime law, which imposes a clear duty to rescue persons in distress at sea. Their conduct also complied with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, which protect the right to life, human dignity, and access to asylum procedures. In practice, their work breathed life into Europe’s stated human rights commitments, showing what those principles look like when translated into action.
Despite this, they were charged with “aiding and abetting irregular migration in Italy.” The Italian court dismissed all charges in April 2024, nevertheless, the long proceeding is a sanction in itself:ears of surveillance, asset seizures and reputational attacks creating significant operational and psychological burdens on the crew. Beyond “Iuventa case” This created a climate of fear across the humanitarian sector, where the threat of criminalisation has become yet another barrier to lifesaving operations.
Comparable developments have taken place across the European Union:
In Poland, five volunteers, known as the “Hajnówka Five,” are on trial and face prison time for providing humanitarian aid to migrants at the Belarus–EU border. In March 2022, they helped a family of seven Iraqi children, their parents, and an elderly Egyptian man with food, clothing, shelter, and transport. .
In Greece, 24 volunteers with the search-and-rescue group Emergency Response Center International (ERCI) went on trial on December 4, 2025, facing felony charges including facilitating illegal entry, migrant smuggling, and money laundering for their work assisting and saving migrants on Lesbos between 2016 and 2018.
Taken together, these cases reveal a consistent and disturbing pattern: human rights are never applied or protected consistently for racialised communities. Solidarity is celebrated for some and criminalised for others. After all, who would be threatened with prison for simply providing food or clothing to a Ukrainian refugee?
Yet Lifeguards, doctors, journalists, priests, volunteers and NGOs acting in line with international and European legal obligations and most importantly in line with basic humanity and morality increasingly face punitive responses when their work intersects with migration control.
Addressing this issue demands far more than updated legal frameworks and effective oversight mechanisms. It requires Europe to face its own contradictions head-on and to finally reckon with the legacy of colonialism – the inequalities and injustices that continue to shape its responses today.
An Ineffective System: What Is Not Working and Why
Despite the breadth of its current legal and institutional framework, the EU has not prevented the growing criminalisation of humanitarian and human-rights work in the migration field. A major structural problem lies in the EU’s own legislation, most notably, the Facilitators’ Package, which includes the Facilitation Directive (2002/90/EC) and the Framework Decision on Smuggling (2002/946/JHA). These instruments require Member States to criminalise “facilitation of irregular entry.” Crucially, unlike international law, the EU framework does not require Member States to exempt acts carried out for humanitarian purposes. The result is a patchwork of national laws in which lifesaving activities, such as search-and-rescue operations, provision of shelter, legal counselling or transportation to medical care, can be interpreted as criminal acts even when no material benefit is involved. This ambiguity has enabled investigations and prosecutions that, while often unsuccessful, create prolonged legal pressure and deter humanitarian engagement.
Beyond legislation, there are clear operational and institutional weaknesses. EU mechanisms designed to protect defenders, such as FRA, identify problems but cannot enforce their recommendations. Oversight remains slow and largely descriptive. National authorities can therefore initiate investigations or surveillance against defenders for years before any EU-level consequence materialises. The “In Defence of Defenders” study conducted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation documents patterns of informal criminalisation, including intimidation by police, administrative obstacles, reputational attacks, data-protection violations and interference by intelligence services. These actions often fall outside the reach of existing EU complaint systems, which are built to address formal legal violations rather than dispersed and informal methods of pressure.
Last but not least, addressing these systemic failures requires the EU to confront the deeper structures that make them possible: its unresolved colonial legacy and the white supremacist logic that continues to shape its border and migration policies. Europe’s borders are not neutral administrative tools, they are political constructions rooted in centuries of racial hierarchy, resource extraction, and the unequal valuing of human life. These historical dynamics persist today in the starkly different ways solidarity is rewarded or punished depending on who is moving, why, and from where.
Understanding this legacy is essential. Without acknowledging how colonial thinking underpins the very design of Europe’s migration and border regime – who is protected, who is excluded, who is welcomed, and who is criminalised – any reform will remain surface-level. Criminalisation is not an accident of the system; it is a predictable outcome of a system built to police, control, and deter racialised mobility.
Reckoning with this means more than technical adjustments. It demands a fundamental shift in perspective: recognising that human rights cannot meaningfully exist within a framework that selectively applies them, and that justice requires dismantling the racial hierarchies embedded in EU policy. Only by confronting this legacy head-on can the EU begin to build a migration system grounded in equality, accountability, and basic humanity.
International Human Right Day, what way forward for Europe and migration?
On this Human Rights Day, the question before Europe is not whether it can reform its migration policies, but whether it is willing to confront the forces that shape them. The criminalisation of solidarity is not a technical flaw: it is a moral failure rooted in a system that decides whose lives are worth saving and whose are not. If Europe is serious about defending human rights, it must start by protecting those who defend them, dismantling the colonial and racial hierarchies entrenched in its laws, and creating a migration framework that treats every human life as equal. Anything less is a continuation of the injustice we see today.
