Dutch national Pieter Wittenberg and 23 of his fellow aid workers on trial on Lesbos for helping refugees were acquitted of all charges by a court on Lesbos on Thursday.

The 24 aid workers have been accused of human trafficking, membership of a criminal organisation and money laundering, punishable by 20 years in jail.

Wittenberg (78) was arrested in 2018 during his volunteer work for the Emergency Response Center International, which came to the rescue of refugees in danger of drowning off the coast of Lesbos.

In a statement, he said the verdict had come as a “great relief”. “After all these years, this exoneration feels as if I’m coming up for air after a long dive.”

However, he said, it was “unpalatable” that the prosecution had made it impossible to help refugees during the time it took for the case to come to trial. “That makes me feel empty instead of euphoric,” he said.

Eva Cosse, a senior researcher at human rights organisation Human Rights Watch said the verdict had been “bittersweet”. “Two dozen people were subjected to a seven-year legal ordeal on baseless charges for saving lives,” she told Greek paper eKathimerini.

Figures from UN refugee organisation UNHCR showed that in 2025, some 4,000 of the 48,000 refugees who fled to Greece came to Lesbos.