Smugglers and Traffickers – The Construction of a Political Figure

The two terms describe fundamentally different things. Smuggling refers to facilitating unauthorised border crossings — usually with the consent of those crossing. Trafficking involves coercion, deception and exploitation. In political and media discourse from 2015 onwards, the distinction was systematically collapsed. The effect was to criminalise not only exploitation, but movement itself.

From this followed: anyone involved in the movement of people was recast as an agent of organised crime. This affected above all refugees themselves: those who steered the vehicle of their own flight, but also anyone helping in other ways, distributing water, handling communication, and the like.

What this meant in practice is documented with precision by borderline-europe's 2023 study on Greece: the person who steers the boat is arrested upon arrival, held in pre-trial detention for an average of eight months, tried in proceedings lasting on average 37 minutes — sometimes as little as six — and sentenced to an average of 46 years in prison and a fine of €332,000. In 81 documented trials, smuggled people themselves — including asylum seekers — were systematically convicted of smuggling because they allegedly drove or assisted in driving the boat or car. As of February 2023, 2,154 people were detained in Greek prisons on smuggling charges — the second largest group by crime — with nearly 90% being third-country nationals.

From Sea to Prison documents the criminalization of boat drivers in Italy – people who crossed the Mediterranean and steered the vessel, or were accused of doing so. Since 2013, over 2,500 criminal proceedings have been opened in Italy alone against people accused of driving boats with migrants on board. The report, produced by ARCI Porco Rosso in Palermo together with Alarm Phone, borderline-europe and Borderline Sicilia, is based on interviews with almost fifty people caught up in this juridical storm. People who deny the accusations and people who claim their actions proudly; people still in prison and people who got out. One of the core team members was himself arrested for driving a boat.
The report's premise is straightforward: crossing a border – or helping someone to do so – should not in itself be a crime. The boat driver is not the villain of the system produced by the border regime. More often, they are its most exposed victim.

This is not a side effect. It is the logic of the system. Someone has to steer the boat. Some do so voluntarily, others because they cannot afford to pay as passengers, others because they are forced to at gunpoint. The law makes no distinction. The Geneva Convention explicitly states that asylum seekers shall not be criminalised for the manner of their entry. Greece – and the EU framework that enables it – is in systematic breach of this obligation.

Once the narrative of the "ruthless smuggler" was firmly established, the criminalisation of solidarity followed as a structural extension of the same logic: if those who helped people move were by definition criminals, then those who rescued them at sea could be reframed as their accomplices.

Sources

de:criminalize, Julia Winkler & Lotta Mayr, 2023: "A Legal Vacuum — The Systematic Criminalisation of Migrants for Driving a Boat or Car to Greece"

https://fromseatoprison.info Arci Porco Rosso / borderline-europe / de:criminalize

mEUterei Authors' Collective: "Borders of Violence", Assoziation A, 2022