Amnesty critical of detention conditions

Illegal immigrants in some centres in Malta were suffering from "severe overcrowding and very inadequate sanitary arrangements", according to Amnesty International's annual report.

The report, which documents the human rights situation in 155 countries and territories in 2003, claims there were reports on human rights violations in no fewer than 21 of the 25 EU member states.

Only Cyprus, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are not mentioned in the report.

Contrary to a number of other countries, Malta's human rights shortcomings were focused on the treatment of illegal immigrants.

The report was published just a week after another critical Amnesty report which claimed Eritreans repatriated from Malta in late 2002 were detained and tortured.

Amnesty says the conditions of detention in Malta fell short of international standards. It claims that in one centre people were housed in tents for months during the winter season, suffering cold temperatures and flooding with rainwater.

"Some inmates, including children, had little or no regular access to exercise in the open air and no recreational facilities."

It then goes on to note that during the year efforts were made to allow detained school-age children to leave the centres during the day to attend local schools.

Local NGOs providing basic social and medical services, often on a voluntary basis, reported a sharp deterioration in the mental health of many of the inmates as the time they had spent detained in poor conditions lengthened, without any apparent progress in the processing of their asylum claims.

As expected, the automatic and excessively lengthy detention of asylum-seekers came under criticism by Amnesty. Hundreds of asylum-seekers and unauthorised migrants, including pregnant women, nursing mothers and children, were held in detention centres for aliens on grounds beyond those allowed by international standards and for periods often ranging between one and two years, it said.

The situation, the report notes, was the result of the unauthorised arrival of an unprecedented number of asylum-seekers and migrants between November 2001 and the end of 2003.

The delays in their applications appeared to be largely the result of "acute understaffing" in the Refugee Commissioner's Office.

The report documents claims that detainees in the closed centres were frequently unable to exercise their rights as they were not fully and regularly informed of asylum determination proceedings and their progress and lacked access to timely legal advice.

It welcomed comments made by the Home Affairs Minister in November who said that the detention of asylum-seekers and migrants "should not exceed a reasonable period" and that the government planned to guarantee this via several reforms.

Amnesty lambasted European countries for continuing to use the "war on terror" to undermine human rights in the name of security. It singles out the UK for particular criticism in this respect and adds that the maltreatment of prisoners in Russia practically went unnoticed.

Asylum seekers in Italy had no opportunity to challenge the authorities' decision to expel them as they supposedly posed a danger to national security.

Germany is criticised for an alleged incident of torture, in which a police chief ordered a police officer to use force against a suspect, while an Ethiopian national died during forcible deportation in France.

The human rights organisation heavily criticised the EU for not doing enough to protect human rights within its own borders.

The organisation calls for a human rights agency at EU level to be funded by the EU with sufficient powers to investigate and have access to documents in member states.