ABSTRACT
In this article we focus on the criminalisation of solidarity in the EU, which is being increasingly employed to dissuade undocumented migrants as well as humanitarian activists trying to save their lives. The criminalisation of humanitarianism through the conscious disregard for the distinction among human traffickers, smugglers, and humanitarians should not be seen as an anomaly but rather as the predictable deterioration of the deadly border policy that the EU has been reinforcing over the last twenty-five years. Forebodingly, the punishment of solidarity with the victims of one’s own border policy not only coincides with rising xenophobia in the EU but amounts to a legitimation of it. The demonisation of those who uphold the core ethos of humanism and liberal democracy constitutes a typical tool of illiberal and tyrannical regimes and thus this new trend represents not only an affront to the EU’s core values but the dawn of an unprecedented authoritarian turn in the short history of EUropean integration.
