The court case against the Dutch aid worker Pieter Wittenberg (75) on the Greek island of Lesbos has been adjourned until Friday. The judge will first consider a laundry list of objections submitted by the defense on Tuesday. They mainly focus on the way in which the indictment has been drawn up.
The case against Wittenberg and 23 co-defendants finally started in earnest on Tuesday, after another judge declared itself incompetent in November 2021. They all worked as volunteers for aid organization Emergency Response Center International (ERCI) between 2016 and 2018, helping refugees on their way from Turkey to Lesbos to land safely.
With this they were guilty of, among other things, human smuggling, according to the Greek public prosecutor. They would also have been guilty of espionage and money laundering, among other things. Not true, say Wittenberg and the others: they only helped people ashore who were already in Greek waters anyway, and they didn’t ask for money for that either.
No substantive treatment
The judges did not get to the substantive hearing of the case on Tuesday, because lawyers for the suspects expressed their objections to the charges and the lack of transparency in the process at the start of the case. The collective charges are too general, they argued. It is therefore unclear which of the 24 suspects is exactly accused of what.
Moreover, the translation from the Greek is rattling and in some cases even completely missing, which is contrary to European regulations on a fair trial. There are also no interpreters available. 17 of the 24 suspects are non-Greeks. “We actually filed an indictment against the charges today,” said Wittenberg spokesman Ebel Jan van Dijk.
The judge wants to study the defense’s objections and decided to adjourn the case until Friday. It should then become clear whether she will still deal with the substance of the complaint.
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