The Fourth Wall
Recently, reports of illegal “pushbacks”–an illegal practice of forcibly returning refugees from whence they came–in Greece have soared. Tommy Olsen faces years in prison for documenting pushbacks online.
Lauren Markham
Migrants dive out of a small crammed inflatable to help navigate to Greek shores in 2015. Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
It was June in northern Norway, a time of year when there’s little night to speak of anyway, and Tommy Olsen had spent most of it fielding distress calls from migrant boats crossing the Aegean Sea into Greece.
Like most mornings, the schoolteacher and father of five awoke to dozens of WhatsApp messages. This, too, was usual enough. He made coffee and settled into what stood for his office — a desk crammed into a narrow hallway between his daughter’s room, the kitchen and the family bathroom — and got to work.
One message was from a group of refugees from West Africa who were in the southeastern Aegean Sea off the small island of Kos. The boat, like all boats that contact the Aegean Boat Report — the official name for this one-man hallway operation thousands of miles from the Aegean — was on its way to Greece from the shores of Turkey, crossing the treacherous gateway into the European Union in pursuit of protection.
The group sent Olsen their coordinates and a video of the boat charging forth into the full, bright light of the Greek summer. It was an inflatable vessel with 31 people crammed inside, all from West Africa. He’d seen far worse — sometimes boats like this carry 50, lining smugglers’ pockets with more cash at the expense of the refugees’ safety — but even so, this boat was unsteady. The men sat perched on the pontoons with the women and children nestled at their feet.
Then the video took a sinister turn.
A Coast Guard boat was fast approaching. While this might have first appeared to be a rescue operation, it quickly became clear it was what’s commonly called a pushback, an illegal practice of forcibly returning refugees from whence they came.
The Coast Guard vessel was menacing with a machine gun mounted at the bow. Then a fiberglass speedboat came into view, also mounted with a gun. The camera bobbled in the chop as the passengers panicked; they yelled to the Coast Guard officers for help and shrieked in distress as their boat keeled and lurched.
“Please,” they implored the authorities in English. “Please!” The refugees were most likely filming because, like many refugees arriving to Greece, they knew all about pushbacks, reports of which had become commonplace. Greek authorities have been routinely and credibly accused of attempting to stop refugees from arriving on EU soil by hauling their boats back to Turkish seas, and even rounding up refugees once they’d made landfall in Greece.
Refugees crossing this stretch often held up a camera in hopes to stop a pushback, in part by sharing the footage with the Aegean Boat Report.
That was 2021. In previous years, pushbacks had become Tommy Olsen’s obsession, something he juggled alongside his day job. If he kept documenting them, he thought, perhaps he could stop them.
Olsen watched as the authorities escorted the boat toward shore before bringing the flotilla to a halt. The group of refugees grew quiet. But then the authorities on the Hellenic Coast Guard vessel began to mount the gunwales, boat hooks in hand. One officer, face shrouded in a balaclava, emerged from the hardtop with a machine gun pointing skyward. At that, the refugees began to panic again. According to hundreds of witness testimonies collected by human rights organizations over the years, it wasn’t uncommon for authorities to point guns directly at the passengers and use boat hooks and other tools to pierce the pontoons or smash the engines.
One of the refugees pointed out a pregnant woman in the boat. “We will die with a baby! And you’ll be happy!”
Over the next 10 minutes, the situation grew even more tense. It was unclear what the Greek authorities were planning. Eventually, the refugees began shouting at the officers; in response, one officer slapped his hands over his crotch, the international signal for “suck it.”
There’s really nothing Olsen could reliably do to stop this or any pushback. Sometimes, especially when people manage to make it to shore and tell him they are hiding in the nearby woods to avoid detection, he alerts the Greek authorities and human rights agencies in hopes that making an official record will make it less likely the refugees will be disappeared. At the time this particular video was taken, more often than not, the refugees who contacted him ended up spirited away.
This is, in part, because Greek authorities had effectively outlawed volunteers, NGO workers and even journalists from coming to refugees’ assistance. Anyone found at a boat landing risks arrest. That means there are fewer people assisting refugees upon first arrival (in contrast with just a few years ago, when Greek beaches would sometimes be packed with more eager-to-help volunteers than refugees on boats). It also means there are few witnesses.
The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, explains that what the Greek government’s approach to migration “has fostered for refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and the human rights defenders acting in solidarity with them is an atmosphere of fear — particularly a fear of criminalization.”
By the time this video was published in June 2021, Olsen was exposing pushbacks on his blog almost weekly. The more stories he published, the more followers he gained, the more members of the right-wing Greek government scrutinized his efforts — suggesting he was a propagandist agent of Turkey, a purveyor of fake news, even in cahoots with smugglers.
Olsen kept messaging with the group but soon lost contact. A few days later, the Turkish Coast Guard published a video of a rescue: they lifted 31 refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa from a shoddy raft onto their vessel — the same 31 Olsen had been in touch with. Olsen had seen that, when possible, many of the passengers pushed back would try to cross again. They’d come from so far, risked so much, and spent so much money that, for most refugees, giving up rarely felt like an option.
What this group of refugees provided Tommy was somewhat rare: clear and lengthy footage of a pushback in action, which he could then map to the Turkish footage of the same people from just days later. Olsen posted it on his blog and on Facebook, where he has some 80,000 followers.
“The video you are about to watch is of an illegal pushback carried out by the Greek coastguard,” he wrote. “It was just one of 491 incidents since March 2020, in which 14,720 men, women and children have been denied their fundamental human rights by a coast guard armed with assault rifles and behaving like a sea-militia ‘defending’ Greece against innocent, unarmed, and peaceful men, women and children attempting to find safe places to live.”
The video was picked up by the BBC and PBS and went somewhat viral for a few days. It seemed to be strong, incontrovertible evidence that pushbacks were happening — which the Greek government routinely denied. Not only that, but it named names; the officers from Kos were clearly identifiable.
Olsen continued to document thousands of pushbacks that year, and the next. He recorded stories of people drowning, being beaten by the Coast Guard, scrambling through scrub brush to make it to the refugee camps. Then, one morning in 2022, Olsen was reading the Greek newspapers and learned a northern European man operating a hotline and blog was under investigation for forming a criminal organization and facilitating illegal entry of migrants into Greece — effectively, human smuggling. There was no one else it could be but him.
A Greek lawyer confirmed he was, in fact, being charged with crimes against the Greek government. The indictment originated from a prosecutor on the island of Kos.
Olsen first traveled to Lesbos, Greece — an island some 175 miles north of Kos — in 2015, when the refugee boats had begun to arrive en masse, sometimes more than 1,000 people arriving on the islands in a single day.
He’d been vacationing in Greece his whole life and felt a curious disconnect watching news footage from his home in Tromsø, the largest city in northern Norway. What he saw — boats packed nearly to sinking, bodies washing up on shore, ramshackle tents, volunteer medical workers providing emergency care — looked like a war zone.
So he booked a ticket to Lesbos, where the majority of boats were landing. The Lesbos airport is situated south of the island’s capital, just a stone’s throw from the sea. As Olsen stepped into his rental car, he spotted a boat lurching toward the shore. He sprinted to the beach and waded into the water to steady the vessel upon the waves, helping the passengers to safety.
That was the beginning — his baptism, he now calls it. He spent the next few weeks volunteering as a first responder, helping steady the boats as they made landfall, handing out emergency provisions, rappelling down the ragged cliffs to prevent shipwrecks and drownings, staying up all night to monitor the sea.
He carried people to shore. He pulled corpses from boats and laid them upon the sand.
Once, a boat radioed to say they were in distress; several children were unconscious, barely breathing. The volunteers would learn the parents had given the children sleeping pills to quiet and soothe them, but now feared the dose had been too high. The children were OK in the end, but in the frenzy, everyone had missed another passenger in distress. As others were hauled from the boat, they discovered a man had been smothered under his fellow passengers. He had two amputated legs. They buried him at the cemetery designated for migrants.
In 2015, pushbacks were relatively uncommon in Greece. In fact, the Coast Guard routinely rescued people (and, in spite of the alleged abuses, continues to conduct rescues). Village grandmothers were baking bread and cookies to bring to shoreline, and fishermen were abandoning their catch to lift people from the water. Olsen felt useful, needed. He went back to Norway, to his family and work as a schoolteacher, but came back to Lesbos again during the next school vacation, and then again, and again.
When he was home, he missed the work on Lesbos. He obsessively read the news, but there wasn’t great information about what was happening beyond the headlines. He launched the Aegean Boat Report blog in 2017 to gather and share information for current and former volunteers so that, even back home, international volunteers like him could stay connected.
Soon, the situation changed. By 2018, many in Greece had grown resentful of the crisis being placed on their shoulders by the rest of Europe, whose powers had also imposed austerity measures on Greece in the wake of the 2008 crash. (As the former Greek finance minister would later explain, “In 2010, for every $100 of income a Greek made, the state owed €146 to foreign banks.”)
The country was strapped to what amounted to an endless cycle of debt. In 2019, the leftist party Syriza lost the national elections — in part as a result of its failure to extricate Greece from the debt — and a right-wing party was voted in. Officials began increasingly “tightening” border security, which appeared to involve a systematic shadow campaign of pushbacks.
“Fifty-seven people that arrived on two boats on Lesbos north yesterday seem to have disappeared,” Olsen wrote in August 2020. He posted photos of the group, including a number of small children (blurring their faces).
Olsen’s blog now had a deeper purpose: to document what was happening in hopes of garnering international support against this “refoulement,” or extrajudicial return of asylum seekers without due process, and to stop the pushbacks. The Coast Guard had guns, drones, speedboats and advanced surveillance technology, but the refugees had phones. This basic technology was central to the Aegean Boat Report’s new operations: Refugees like that group of West Africans could record videos and audio messages, as well as take photographs, send them to Olsen, and verify their locations. All Olsen had to do was add some text and post to his blog.
It didn’t take long for his blog to attract the attention of Greek authorities. Word got out about Olsen’s efforts among people on the move, too. His number began circulating on Facebook and WhatsApp, and people on refugee boats were contacting Olsen night and day. He made sure to first confirm their location and identities to be sure they weren’t frauds, but, above all, to be sure they were already in Greek territory. If he substantively connected with them when they were still Greece-bound, he knew he could risk prosecution as a human smuggler for assisting. The only thing he could offer, practically and under the letter of the law, was documentation to make it less likely the authorities could disappear them.
Since he first began documenting, people have reported pushbacks monthly, if not weekly.
“The Greek parliament should urgently establish an inquiry into all allegations of collective expulsions,” read a dispatch from Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2020, “including pushbacks, and violence at the borders, and determine whether they amount to a de facto government policy.”
But credible reports of pushbacks have only continued. These types of shadow practices make exact numbers hard to come by, but journalists, human rights workers and NGOs have helped confirm the credibility of thousands of refoulement cases in recent years. Forensic Architecture, a data-visualization organization, documents 2,010 individual pushback (which they call “drift back”) incidents between 2020 and 2023, affecting 55,445 people, with almost all of the incidents occurring off the Aegean islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes and Kos.
The right-wing New Democracy Party that won elections in 2019 is still in power. Since 2015, more than a million refugees have arrived in Greece, a country of 10.4 million people. The past two election cycles, New Democracy has campaigned with a tough-on-migration platform, vowing to seal borders and crack down on human smugglers.
But tracking down multi-billion-dollar smuggling networks in Turkey — a longtime political adversary of Greece — is no small feat.
“The Greek authorities never managed to chase the real migrant smugglers,” explains Zacharias Kesses, Olsen’s attorney. “Apart from some isolated cases, and some serious arrests, they never had the ability or even the will to reach international smuggling networks.”
But the government needed arrests, Kesses believes, to make it seem like something was being done to curb — or at least punish — migration. In his estimation, authorities instead prioritized prosecuting the refugees driving the boats, claiming they were the smugglers, though it’s widely documented that smugglers rarely travel in the boats because it’s too dangerous. The Greek government also began blaming humanitarian workers, like Olsen.
Take Seán Binder, an Irish man in his mid-twenties who traveled to Lesbos in 2017 to volunteer with a search and rescue operation called Emergency Response Centre International, or ERCI, which patrolled the Aegean for shipwrecks and provided humanitarian aid — water, food, blankets, basic medical care — to people who made it ashore. Binder, a rescue scuba diver, had special skills to offer, and he felt a responsibility to help.
Binder conducted life-saving work. But in 2018, four months after he arrived in Lesbos, the Greek police arrested him and others, including a fellow volunteer, Sarah Mardini. (Mardini, a former refugee from Syria and competitive swimmer, had swum her refugee boat to safety when it first arrived in Greece; she and her sister are the subject of the 2022 Netflix film, The Swimmers.)
“When you say something is illegal,” Binder told me when we met during one of his trials, “or you say something is heroic, both suggest that it is not normal to provide help. But that’s exactly what it is. What I did was very normal. You would do it, I would do it, anyone would. If you see someone drowning, you’ll try to help.”
Binder and Mardini spent months in Greek jail. Ultimately, the Greek government charged a total of 24 humanitarians from their group with human smuggling, money laundering and espionage. The espionage charges were dropped in 2023, though they still face other felonies.
This crackdown on solidarity workers isn’t only happening in Greece. Italy, for instance, charged four members of the Iuventa — a ship that has rescued more than 14,000 people in the Mediterranean — with “aiding and abetting illegal migration.” Italy also charged Pia Klemp, the German captain who piloted ships for the rescue organization Sea-Watch, with “aiding and abetting illegal immigration to Italy” — a crime for which she faced 20 years in prison. French farmer Cédric Herrou routinely found refugees passing across his land and provided them shelter — an act for which he was charged with the crime of “facilitating irregular entry.”
As Amnesty International has put it, EU countries have “created a hostile environment for human rights defenders and civil society organizations conducting rescue missions at sea, with the aim to reduce the number of people reaching Europe in search of protection or a better life.”
Scott Warren, of the Arizona-based organization No More Deaths, was also charged with felony human smuggling and littering on U.S. federal land — because he leaves jugs of water for migrants as they cross through the punishing desert. During the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security kept a secret list of legal aid workers and journalists covering migration. Federal officials monitored their activities, stopped them for prolonged and intimidating questioning and even detention, and put holds on some aid workers’ and journalists’ passports to prevent travel. One attorney, Nora Phillips, was detained by Mexican authorities on the way to a family vacation; she and her daughter were then sent back to the United States, because of the list.
The cases criminalizing aid workers seem to be a new layer of border defense: criminalizing not just the migrating people, but the bystanders who work to defend them.
Because the details of these charges are often spurious (claiming that chatting via WhatsApp constitutes using encrypted software, for instance, or that leaving out jugs of water counts as littering), none of the humanitarians listed above have been convicted of their alleged crimes. On a practical level, the charges serve to hijack the lives of the accused, who must spend years tangled up in costly legal battles that limit their ability to travel, secure employment, plan their lives and continue humanitarian work.
“I don’t believe they are creating all these cases to convict them,” explains Kesses, Olsen’s attorney who also represented Binder, Mardini and other humanitarians charged by the Greek government. Rather, Kesses says, it’s a matter of “judicial harassment.”
“They want to intimidate me in order to keep me silent,” Olsen said of his recent charges. “This is the entire point.”
It can work. In May 2023, shortly after the Olsen indictment was announced, the Lesbos-based sea watch organization Mare Liberum — which had been conducting rescue missions and monitoring pushbacks — announced its dissolution.
Though the group hadn’t been indicted for any crimes, organization leaders wrote in a final press release that they had “experienced sabotage, obstruction and repression during our time in the Aegean, and not only in Greece. The Hellenic Coast Guard has repeatedly tried to intimidate us.” The police had raided their ship and surveilled their team members, their passage from port was blocked, and stringent administrative hurdles were created that, combined, ultimately forced Mare Liberum to close.
The cases against aid workers can also intimidate other would-be volunteers. As Eva Cossé of HRW sees it, such cases are “meant to send a chilling message to all who dare to seek accountability and defend the rights of migrants.”
Without advocates, migrants often lack the support necessary to apply for protection, to navigate the legal and social service systems of their new host country, to get out of detention, and sometimes even for the basic needs of survival.
Without witnesses, border agents can more easily destroy the water left out in the desert, conduct extrajudicial detention and mass deportations in the United States, and enact violent pushbacks in the Mediterranean — where Coast Guard officers have been credibly accused of simply dragging refugees back out to sea to drift, or drown.
Soon after the indictment against Olsen was issued, the Greek prosecutor’s office sent him an official request to report to Greece to respond to the charges. Olsen refused, as his lawyer believed it likely to end in arrest.
This didn’t stop Olsen from continuing his work on the Aegean Boat Report. In fact, the blog began to take up more and more of his life, much to the perplexity — and sometimes the ire — of his wife and some of his children. He quit his job as a schoolteacher, managing to find funding from individual donors and various nonprofits — many of whom gave on condition of anonymity — to support his family.
Hundreds of people continued to contact him, begging for help. He received videos of people being beaten, of phones being destroyed and belongings tossed into the water. He recorded testimonies of people being stripped naked at sea. His efforts often resulted in little more than witnessing the crimes committed against them.
Then, in June 2023, Olsen received another video from Kos.
In it, a group of 14 Syrian and Palestinian refugees had been thrown into the back of a van, wrists tied behind their back, packing tape binding their eyes shut. They were begging for mercy, to use the bathroom, but were ignored.
Olsen posted the video, which immediately garnered hundreds of thousands of views. The next day, the group was registered at the refugee camp instead of being shipped back to sea.
The mayor of Kos threatened to sue the Aegean Boat Report. The response led to a headline in the local Kos press: “I will sue the NGO who defames the island.”
“The NGO Aegean Boat Report is obsessed with Kos,” he later said. That Olsen didn’t keep quiet didn’t help his criminal case, and refusing to be silent would come at a cost.
In the spring of 2024, nearly three years after the Kos pushback video was published and roughly a year after the initial indictment, Olsen learned that Greek prosecutors had issued a warrant for his arrest.
“I’m receiving disturbing news from #Greece that an arrest warrant has been issued against human rights defender Tommy Olsen,” tweeted the UN’s Mary Lawlor on May 30. “He is being targeted in what appears to be an arbitrary investigation criminalizing his work in defense of the rights of migrants.”
The warrant wasn’t enforceable in Norway. All the same, Olsen and his lawyers had already briefed the Norwegian police on the political nature of the charges in hopes they wouldn’t storm down the door if such a warrant was issued.
So far, they haven’t. But at any moment, Greece could ask Norway to extradite Olsen, and if the Norwegian courts find the evidence against him credible, he would be taken to Greece, where he’d be imprisoned while awaiting trial, which could take years. If convicted, he could face more than a decade in prison.
Regardless of what happens, this case, Olsen says — which has required a good deal of time and financial resources — has already hijacked his life.
It also began to upend his work at the Aegean Boat Report. In July of last year, he sent a note out to journalists and supporters on social media: “It’s with a heavy heart that I’m now announcing that Aegean Boat Report is forced to drastically scale down on our operations, due to lack of funding.”
While he’d found a few organizations interested in funding his work, once the arrest warrant was issued, they rescinded their offers — not because they believed he was guilty, he explained to me, but because they couldn’t risk the potential legal or reputational ramifications.
When I reached out to the Greek government for comment on Olsen’s case, a representative for the Ministry of Migration said they were not able to speak on the matter, since it was in the hands of the court system. “A basic pillar of operations in all democratic countries is the Principle of the separation of powers,” the representative wrote in Greek.
As to the matter of the human rights abuses, the representative wrote, the Hellenic Coast Guard has saved 255,875 migrant lives since 2017, operating with “absolute respect for human life and human rights, in accordance with international and EU law.”
Olsen, meanwhile, has kept at it. Since issuing his missive this past fall, he has managed to garner enough individual monthly donors to keep things going — for now. He continues his operations from Norway, and the Greek government denies or ignores his evidence. The threats against him — which he sees as attempts to silence his truth-telling — have only emboldened him.
Someone I interviewed once explained to me that I should think of border security as a succession of three “walls.” This could be an actual border fortification (Greece did, after all, propose building a floating wall across the Aegean), or the remote, difficult terrain of the border zone — the desert, the fast-moving river, the mountains, the roiling sea.
Then there is the second wall — the officials who patrol the border — and the third: official checkpoints and policies that try to capture migrants deeper into the country’s interior.
The increasing global efforts to undermine and criminalize humanitarian workers like Olsen might then be seen as a fourth: an attempt to stop anyone trying to help people on the move, or document abuses against them.
“There is a space for border control,” Binder told me at a café on the island of Lesbos when he’d returned for one of the trials against him, “but there must at least be a minimum bottom line, which is that people aren’t drowning.
“If that isn’t the intention, it’s certainly the effect of our border policies.”
Cases against activists like Binder and Olsen suggest that no one is immune or insulated from these policies. “The border is everywhere” is a common refrain among immigration activists. That means its laws and logic are, too: Once a wall is built, anyone can find themselves on the wrong side.
Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and the Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. She is also the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (2017), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024) and Immemorial (2025).
