Boat driver arrests intensify as EU set to tighten smuggling laws

• Migrant arrests increase for third year in a row
• Parents, shipwreck survivors accused of smuggling
• Parliament study calls for pause on law

LONDON - After days at sea making the risky crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands, migrants typically face hours of questioning by Spanish authorities trying to identify - and detain - the drivers of the boats they came on.

But those drivers usually are neither the ringleaders nor profiteers, and they are being wrongfully charged under European Union counter-smuggling rules, non-governmental organisations say.

This summer, as the European Parliament is expected to finalise its position on proposed updates to EU counter-smuggling legislation, those NGOs are warning that the proposals risk perpetuating injustices and fail to target criminal organisations.

The legislation, called the Facilitators Package, spells out the crimes entailed with intentionally helping people enter or move through the EU.

Advocates like Daniel Arencibia, a lawyer based on the island of Gran Canaria, argue the focus should shift from pursuing boat drivers to prosecuting criminal organisations.

Once drivers are arrested, authorities rarely track down who received money for organising the crossings, he said.

"In the Canary Islands, the drivers going to prison do not receive a single dollar for their activity," Arencibia told Context/the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

"They come because they want to find a better life," he said.

Arencibia works on cases of accused migrants in the Canary Islands, where nearly 47,000 people arrived illegally in 2024.

He has been documenting arrests made under people-smuggling laws in the Atlantic region of Spain.

For a third year in a row, the number of migrants accused under these laws across Europe increased in 2024, with 91 migrants facing legal proceedings, a 20% increase on 2023, according to an April report.

The year-on-year increase reflects an intensified drive to identify smugglers among people arriving irregularly in Europe, said Silvia Carta, author of the report by the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM).

Over 80% of documented legal proceedings in 2024 – including 142 people accused of acting in solidarity with migrants – involved charges of facilitation of entry, transit or stay or migrant smuggling.

The PICUM report showed most migrants are acquitted, often because cases are built on poor evidence. However, Carta said some cases in which the accused did not have legal support might not have been counted.

Survivor or smuggler?

Most of those facing criminal charges are accused of steering a boat, driving a vehicle across a border or managing passengers on board, according to the PICUM report.

The accused have included survivors of deadly shipwrecks, such as nine Egyptian men accused of piloting a boat that sank off the coast of Greece in 2023, killing hundreds of passengers.

The men were detained for a year before the case was dismissed in May 2024.

The investigative journalism outlet Solomon later found that Greek authorities knew the men were not part of the criminal network that organised the voyage as early as a month after the disaster.

PICUM found charges also have been brought against people for distributing food or drink on board boats, using a map or helping their children.

"Parents responsible for their children automatically fulfil the definition of facilitation because they're facilitating someone else's entry," said Carta.

In one case, a Congolese woman faces five years in prison after being accused of smuggling her daughter and niece to Italy in 2019. The trio used fake identity documents to travel by plane to apply for asylum.

Lawyers on the case have requested a ruling from the European Court of Justice on whether the Facilitators Package should apply when a person has not profited from helping others enter illegally.

The United Nations defines migrant smuggling as obtaining financial or material benefit for procuring someone's illegal entry.

The EU's Facilitators Package currently does not require financial gain as a criteria for the crime of facilitating entry.

The proposed update introduces the element of financial or material benefit, but Carta said an element of criminal intent or exploitation should also be included.

"The legal text should be extremely precise in narrowing down what can be criminalised," she said.

A European Commission spokesman said the aim of the proposed updates was to target smugglers.

"Our position is clear – humanitarian assistance should not be criminalised. What must be criminalised, is facilitating illegal entry, transit or stay in the EU in particular when it's done for profit," the spokesman said.

Beyond the boat driver

The European Parliament's committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), which oversees EU policy and legislation in those areas, criticised the Commission for failing to carry out an impact assessment on the proposed legislative update.

It commissioned a substitute study, published in March, that found the Facilitators Package does not distinguish between exploitative action or action based on solidarity, whether by family members or humanitarian actors.

The study calls for the definition of migrant smuggling to fully align with the U.N. protocol and says the new directive should focus specifically on criminal groups.

It wants the Commission to withdraw the proposed update until it carries out an impact assessment.

The LIBE committee also wants an exemption for humanitarian assistance to be made legally binding and to scrap new offences that criminalise the public instigation of irregular migration such as via social media.

(Reporting by Beatrice Tridimas; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst.)