An Afghan illegal migrant has been charged with child endangerment offences after getting a 6-year-old killed by bringing him on a dangerous dinghy trip to Greece.
The 25-year-old migrant, given the pseudonym “Abdul” by the left-wing Guardian, brought the child on a boat while attempting to reach the Greek island of Samos from neighbouring Turkey — a safe country — and break the European Union’s common external border.
The boat, believed to be a small dinghy, overturned at sea, however. The Afghan and a number of other passengers still managing to reach the shore, but the child was lost to the waves.
Pro-migration NGO civil society “charities” and legal outfits have complained about the Greek authorities’ decision to charge the migrant with exposing a young person to danger, with his lawyer, Dimitris Choulis, complaining that “these charges are going to be used as one more obstacle to any asylum seeker to actually come here to apply for asylum.”
“If [asylum seekers] know that if you get into a boat with your family you will be criminally charged because you put them in danger, then we create more obstacles for people to arrive here,” he objected, perhaps not considering that deterring migrants from bringing children on dangerous voyages from safe countries may be the exact purpose of the charges.
The Greeks have also detained a 23-year-old man who is believed to have captained the doomed vessel.
A somewhat cavalier attitude towards the safety of children by boat migrants is also an issue in the English Channel, with undercover reporters having recently filmed a small, crying girl pleading “I don’t want to go, Daddy” as she is ordered into a boat preparing to depart from a French beach at night in choppy waters.
Indeed, the French authorities, which have been observed catching up to migrant boats at sea and simply shadowing them into British waters rather than intercepting them and turning them around on multiple occasions, have previously blamed their inaction on migrants threatening to throw children overboard if they get too close.
Despite this, no-one has ever been charged for making such threats or for child endangerment offences more generally on reaching Britain.
Christian conservative journalist Peter Hitchens, brother of the late atheist left-liberal Christopher Hitchens, is one of a few major commentators in Britain who have questioned the morality of “people consciously endangering the lives of small children (and lifeboat crews) in an effort to improve their living standards a bit.”