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. It’s actually protected activities,’” Olsen told Al Jazeera. 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). 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. 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”.
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