Greece: CPT volunteer reflects on teenager sentenced to 44 years for steering refugee dingy

He bent his head down momentarily and then raised it to brace himself for the verdict and the sentence. "Guilty."

"Forty-four years in prison," a staggering reality for a teenage refugee, who thought he would be released because of his age and background. All his dreams and hopes for his life, wiped away at the stroke of the judge's pen. His only hope now is in the appeals process, which often results in greatly reducing the sentence.

We were stunned. After visiting him in the jail the day before the trial, and hearing the agonizing story of his family fleeing death threats in their home country, I felt a deep pain and grief.

His crime: human smuggling. He had driven the small dinghy boat transporting forty other refugees from Turkey to Lesvos, Greece in order to pay for his family's passage and was caught by the Greek coast guards.

For six hours in the courtroom, one man after another faced the judge. Some of the men were refugees, but most were young Turkish men who took the job in order to get out of a personal financial crisis. Their lives are over. Our hearts bottomed-out. Prosecutors stridently insisted that they each get the maximum penalty for their crime, which by Greek law is a fine plus 15 years in prison for each person in the boat, whose life they endangered. Some of the men got over a 100-year sentence, but the maximum that any will serve is 25. Defense lawyers pled sincerely and compassionately for leniency for their clients. But she remained cold toward the accused. The judge's demeanor and the harshness of Greek law repulsed me. Our lawyer also felt shocked and told us she had never seen a judge in this court be so inflexible and harsh in her rulings as today.

No one in the courtroom supported people making immense profits from smuggling refugees in unsafe boats. It's a horrendous crime against these vulnerable and desperate people. But the people on trial in this courtroom were not the people running these illegal businesses and getting rich. These were the young, desperate men they hired or bargained with to take the legal risk of driving the boats without understanding the potential consequences of their actions. And so the laws and prosecutions against human smuggling are not deterring this crime. They are not addressing the governmental regulations that push desperate people to choose illegal and unsafe ways of reaching a safe place to live.

One can choose to look at the men on trial through the eyes of 'law and order'. Or, one can choose to look more deeply at the injustices that the system smoothes over and tries to hide, and at who profits from the law. We can choose to see the humanity of these men who are the victims of our global wars and intervention and seek to address the root causes of their illegal activity. We can provide safe and legal passage and repatriation for people fleeing violence, and dry up the human trafficking of refugees. The hardest task, though, is for our societies to find and see new, compassionate ways of living in our global world and ways of preventing these crises.

At times like this, words I grew up hearing come back to me, "He/she who has eyes, let them see."

Read more about Christian Peacemaker Teams here: http://cpt.org/