Eritrea was considered a "stable" destination and there was "no evidence whatsoever" of persecution when 220 Eritreans were repatriated in 2002, the government said yesterday.
The Home Affairs Ministry defended itself in the light of a report by Amnesty International saying that a number of deported Eritrean illegal immigrants had been tortured and killed on their return to their country.
Amnesty is now urging the Maltese government to send a delegation to Eritrea to see for itself if it still felt sceptical about the contents of the report.
The 47-page report, Eritrea: You Have No Right to Ask, probes the appalling human rights situation in the African nation, backed by a series of interviews carried out with former inmates. Some of the harrowing torture procedures were recounted by a number of those shuttled out of Malta in September 2002.
A spokesman for the Home Affairs Ministry said that Eritrea had been declared safe by the UNHCR when the immigrants were repatriated. In fact, during that time the same United Nations agency was also repatriating people to Eritrea.
A Tripartite Repatriation Commission meeting between the governments of Sudan, Eritrea and UNHCR in March 2002 had agreed to the repatriation of Eritrean refugees.
Several Eritreans refused to return home, however, for fear of persecution because of their political affiliations or religious beliefs.
The spokesman said the government had no authority to declare whether a person should be granted or refused refugee or humanitarian protection status. Institutions like the Refugee Commission and the Refugee Appeals Board decided this in accordance with United Nations Refugee Agency guidelines.
If a person was not granted refugee status by the Refugee Commission and had his appeal refused, the government had every right according to law to repatriate the person to his country of origin.
At the time, the UNHCR had asked the government to deal with each case on its own merits and this recommendation was followed, the spokesman said.
One had also to keep in mind that at the time more than half of the Eritreans involved did not even apply for refugee status, he added.
"In the published report there are only allegations that some of the returned Eritreans were tortured.
"In fact, as stated in the same report, most of the returned Eritreans were set free immediately on arrival in Eritrea. A small number, who breached the country's laws on conscription, were detained in prison. The government cannot continue to monitor similar cases."
At the time of their deportation, Eritrea was considered safe, the ministry insisted. However, circumstances may change and the UNHCR is once again considering declaring Eritrea a dangerous country.
The ministry pointed out that a number of Eritreans in Malta were recently transferred to an open centre. Their applications for refugee or humanitarian protection were refused both by the Refugee Commission and by the Appeals Board but they had filed a constitutional application, which after one-and-a-half years was still undecided.
The government, as a sign of goodwill, released these persons from detention to open centres.
At present, there are 31 male Eritreans in the Hal-Far detention centre. They arrived in Malta on April 9.
Martin Hill, Amnesty International's researcher for the horn of Africa, said it was estimated that about 150 of the Malta deportees were still being detained in prisons.
About 30 had escaped, while women, children and those over the conscription age limit of 40 years had been released.
While it was true that the government had abided by the guidelines set by the UNHCR, Dr Hill said it was worth pointing out that the UN ultimately left it in the government's hands to repatriate the immigrants if it deemed fit.
"If Malta doesn't take this issue seriously, even if one person alone was tortured, then you are risking breaking the Geneva Convention," Dr Hill said.
Asked about the reliability of the interviews detailed in the report, he explained that a researcher at Amnesty is trained to eliminate political bias and look for consistency during the in-depth interviews with the escapees.
"In these cases there was a pattern and the detail was impressive," Dr Hill said.