Ministries confident of new visa procedures

The Ministry of Justice and the Interior, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry for Tourism and Culture yesterday said they were confident that the new procedures dealing with the issuing of visas to Chinese students will bear the desired results.

In a joint statement, the ministries said that over the past few weeks they had been involved in intensive discussions in order to produce the appropriate procedures.

They said the result of these combined efforts was the production of guidelines that are intended to make the visa procedure more secure and efficient and strike the right balance between the needs of the tourism industry and security considerations.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs will be assuming a determining role in the visa process through the introduction of an interview of the applicants and a proficiency test in English for those Chinese nationals who claim that they wish to study in Malta.

The Federation for English Language Learning Schools (FELTOM) has expressed its appreciation towards the three ministries and has pledged the full co-operation of language schools to ensure that the new guidelines are adhered to by their own members, the statement said.

The Times yesterday reported that visa procedures for prospective Chinese students will now become more rigorous, following police investigations into the system and the deaths of Chinese illegal migrants in the Malta-Sicily channel some months ago. This had fuelled suspicions that students with visas were using Malta as a springboard to Europe.

Official sources told The Times that the European Union presidency recently informed the Chinese government about 48 travel agents in China who are considered unreliable by the EU in view of the fact that some of the documents held by Chinese students in Europe contained wrong information.