Caught at the helm

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Katy Fallon tells the story of the refugees and other migrants ensnared in Greece’s legal crossfire. Greek authorities routinely prosecute those found near the controls of boats carrying people trying to reach Europe, but human rights monitors assert that it is vulnerable passengers, not real smugglers, who are ending up behind bars. Katy reveals a system where chaotic trials last a matter of minutes but can result in prison sentences of hundreds of years. And she meets Akif Rasuli, a young Afghan man compensated for wrongful imprisonment after spending almost three years behind bars. Amid Europe-wide efforts to clamp down on irregular migration, are tough people smuggling policies seeing the wrong people pay a heavy price?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Turkey and this is Sammers. You cannot see the difference because they are so close from this place.
0:12.0	So it's like a tiny little gap between the two.
0:15.0	A tiny gap exactly.
0:17.0	It's like a gorgeous beautiful summer day.
0:19.0	This is everything that you would imagine about a Greek summer holiday, sunshine, parasols, sun loungers.
0:31.0	But this is what Samos is.
0:33.0	It's at the same moment.
0:35.0	A paradise for some, I help for some else.
0:40.0	This is Dimitries Hulis.
0:42.0	He's driving me across his home island of Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean.
0:47.0	Here is where we have our music festival and just 500 meters away it's where we throw people.
0:58.0	What do you mean by throw people?
1:00.0	Dead. People that happen to die here and no one cares on or we don't try enough to find
1:06.4	the place or have a proper funeral or anything like that we just tap them there.
1:12.2	Through my work as a reporter in Greece, I've known Demetries for years.
1:18.0	He's a lawyer at the Human Rights Legal Project,
1:21.0	a non-profit organization providing legal support to refugees and other migrants
1:25.2	in Greece.
1:26.8	I first came across him in 2020, when I was covering the story of a father who was charged
1:31.9	with endangering the life of his small child.
1:35.2	Father and son were on a dinghy that sank off the coast nearby as the people on board tried
1:39.5	to cross from Turkey to Greece.
	...

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