Latvian Activist Who Helped Asylum Seekers Waits for Court Verdict Thursday

This coming Thursday, October 31, Latvian Woman Human Rights Defender Ieva Raubiško is expecting to hear if she is going to prison for helping people trying to seek protection near the border with Belarus.

Ieva case is one of an alarming series brought across Europe against Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) helping asylum seekers in recent years.

The charges against Ieva—“organizing intentional illegal crossing of the state border for a group of people”—concern her helping five asylum seekers on whose behalf she had obtained an interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights ordering the Latvian government to refrain from deporting them and to provide basic humanitarian assistance, including food, water, clothing, medical care, and temporary shelter.

Ieva and a fellow activist Egils Grasmanis were detained and interrogated by border guards when they visited the border zone to ensure that the authorities were complying with the court ruling. Charges against Grasmanis were dropped but she still faces jail. Ieva is a social anthropologist by education and has been working with the Latvian NGO Gribu palīdzēt bēgļiem (I Want to Help Refugees).

One of the Syrian asylum seekers Ieva helped testified in court how they were pushed back many times between Belarus and Latvia and how they reached out to local activists seeking help. She told the court that Ieva did not instruct the asylum seekers how to cross the border, nor did she facilitate their crossing.

Ieva told the court that “all I did was to help the group to stay alive,” and explained the awful conditions faced by asylum seekers at the border, particularly during the winter, resulting in deaths or the loss of limbs due to frostbite.

I have reported for Human Rights First on the situation of HRDs working near the Belarus border with Poland, where the government’s harsh tactics targeting those who try to help people seeking asylum are similar. They are being targeted for helping people with basic humanitarian needs and criminalized for their kindness. In 2022 Human Rights First gave an HRD award to Grupa Granica, a network of HRDs in Poland helping people who cross the border from Belarus.

Over the last three years, thousands of people have attempted to cross from Belarus into Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Most come from the Middle East or Africa and are often fleeing conflict. Many are women and small children.

The Belarusian government, a close ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, has lured many of them with promises of taking them to the EU border.

Many of those who peacefully help them claim their right to seek protection, like Ieva, have been targeted by the authorities.

Various international NGOs have taken up Ieva’s case as have the Council of Europe’s Commissioner of Human Rights and United Nations Special Rapporteurs, who have publicly told the Latvian authorities that the investigation against her appears to have been “initiated in direct response to their legitimate acts of solidarity with asylum seekers, undertaken with the sole aim of seeking to prevent human rights violations.”

With some trepidation, Ieva is waiting for Thursday, where she could be sentenced to two years in prison. “This case isn’t just about me, it’s a signal to many others who want to help vulnerable people that they shouldn’t,” Ieva told me. “This case is being watched to see if the Latvian court is really going to send someone to jail for helping people to stay alive.”