Accommodation problem spilling to the open centres

Opposition home affairs spokesman Gavin Gulia has urged the government to issue regulations on the administration of open shelters for illegal immigrants.

The centres are used by migrants who are granted refugee status or humanitarian protection and are no longer held in detention.

Dr Gulia said in Parliament that although such migrants were free to live wherever they wished, they could not support themselves and therefore opted to use the accommodation provided by the government. With the number of such people at the open centres growing, problems were growing too and needed to be tackled early.

It was unfortunate, the Labour MP said, that the organisations which so strongly criticised the detention policy did not come forward to offer accommodation to the migrants which were no longer detained.

Dr Gulia was speaking during the debate on a Bill which tightens the Refugees Act and will allow immediate repatriation of migrants who file unfounded applications for refugee status.

Dr Gulia said the issue of illegal migration was a national problem which the opposition did not wish to politicise. Indeed the opposition had been making suggestions on how Malta could best tackle this issue and the governemnt had adopted some of them.

Illegal migration was not a problem of the government's making and the opposition was willing to help out in any way it could, while retaining the right to make constructive criticism where necessary.

Dr Gulia said there were a number of popular misconceptions about illegal immigration, especially about the rights of bona fide refugees to help and protection. Distinctions had to be made between political and economic migrants. The former were usually deserving of protection, but one could not help economic migrants and these had to be repatriated to their country.

In terms of the Geneva Convention, and also out of a moral duty, countries had a duty to help those people forced to leave their country because of political or racial discrimination, torture and genocide. However there were no international guidelines on how a receiving country should treat economic migrants.

He agreed with remarks made earlier by Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg that illegal immigration to Malta had nothing to do with Malta's accession to the EU. This was the sort of misconception that Malta and its people would do well to put behind them immediately.

Dr Gulia said the Opposition agreed with the detention policy. Detention of immigrants who landed in Malta illegally was perfectly legal and this had been confirmed repeatedly by the courts. There was no need for further argument .

Dr Gulia said that although NGOs such as the Jesuit Refugee Service and the Peace Lab were headed by priests, they were not led or controlled by the Church as an institution.

He felt, however, that the Church needed not only to express itself on illegal immigration, but also help the state to ease the problem.

On repatriation, Dr Gulia called for the government to be more politically genuine on the issue. Why had Malta not been able to reach the same sort of agreement Italy had with Libya for the automatic repatriation of migrants? Was Malta not putting enough pressure?

In one instance Dr Borg had said he did not agree with automatic repatriation, then he had gone on to say that he would not mind an agreement with Libya similar to Italy's, which involved automatic repatriation.

If the 70 illegal immigrants repatriated to Egypt this week had not gone voluntarily, then this amounted to automatic repatriation after all, something the opposition agreed with.

On the issue of search and rescue, Dr Gulia said it was true that Malta had, when it became independent, inherited a search and rescue area that was as big as its Flight Information Region (FIR). The SAR area had eventually been reduced, but it was still too large, stretching from Tunisia to Cyprus.

There were two schools of interpretation of the SAR area, one of which rightly held that it was the country nearest to the incident that was duty-bound to intervene. The other held out the unlikely scenario that Maltese SAR was responsible even when an incident took place close to Cyprus. This was inconceivable.

The former interpretation had been given the backing of International Maritime Law.

Dr Gulia said he knew that the government was opposing the second interpretation, not least because it went against the national interest.

Turning to the bill, he said he was pleased to observe that it included proposals which stemmed from a national conference on illegal immigration held a few months ago. The conference had been suggested by the Opposition and initially opposed by the government.

The conference, through Martin Scicluna, had also proposed the creation of a structure based on a single chain of command rather than overlapping between the commander, AFM, and the Police Commissioner.

That suggestion, too, had been taken up by the government through the setting up of the Department for Detention Services.

Dr Gulia said the government and the opposition should have a united front on illegal immigration, particularly in lobbying abroad such as in the EU. Clearly, the EU should have a better understanding of what was happening in Malta. As Italian Minister Gianfranco Fini had acknowledged, this was a European problem. Malta therefore justly expected greater assistance from the EU. What Malta needed was not financial assistance - that effectively meant that the EU would be telling Malta to build more detention centres and hold more migrants. What Malta needed was burden sharing with the EU. For a start EU countries should take and integrate migrants who were granted refugee status.

Dr Gulia expressed concern over moves within the EU which were seeking to establish the period of six months as the time within which an illegal migrant could be held in detention until an application for refugee status was granted. In most cases it was difficult for local institutions to vet and process refugee applications within such a short period, he said. Therefore countries should continue to have the prerogative of establishing what constituted a reasonable period themselves.

In Malta's case, however, there were a number of institutional reasons why decisions were long in coming. The Commissioner for Refugees was working hard, but why was he still a part-timer? Even the Appeals Board was composed of part-timers.

Concluding, Dr Gulia said that for the first time the civilised Western world was experiencing the problem of illegal immigration at first hand. In view of such an influx of illegal immigrants, it was easy for racism and xenophobia to rear their heads. Unfortunately this was happening even in Malta.

But no matter how big the problem, and even if it continued to grow, there was no justification for this attitude or any fundamentalist ideas against migrants. The people should be on their guard not to let such an attitude grow into a torrent. It was everyone's responsibility to stress that all migrants, even those who fled their country for economic reasons should be treated with respect and dignity.