The law and illegal immigrants

It does not take great wisdom to read the writing on the wall. If current trends continue, come the warm season, hundreds of illegal immigrants will break out of the detention centres a few times a week. They will walk to our international airport, accompanied by disarmed members of the armed forces holding their hands behind their backs.

As tourists emerge from the airport, they will see crowds of Africans shouting "We want freedom". That way hundreds of thousands of Maltese liri, spent advertising Malta as a tourist destination, will go up in smoke.

At the same time, other unarmed members of the armed forces will be escorting boatloads of new immigrants into one of the creeks around the island and taking them to the detention centres. There they will organise more breakouts, protest marches and other news events for the ever-ready Maltese media.

At this rate the process will be endless. After all, there are a few million Sub-Saharan Africans in Libya waiting to set sail for Europe.

One conclusion of the report by Judge Franco Depasquale on the illegal immigrants' protest of January 2005 (summarised in The Sunday Times, January 15, 22 and 29) was that the inmates of the detention centres are being advised and guided, and in some cases perhaps even incited, by outside persons, both Maltese and foreign.

In addition, UNHCR, a specialised agency of the United Nations of which Malta is a member state, is failing in its duty of helping to repatriate illegal immigrants not qualifying for refugee or humanitarian status, or at least to find them a country where they are welcome. Instead, it is putting pressure on the Maltese authorities to open up the centres, thus making Malta even more attractive to prospective illegal immigrants.

The recent spate of mass escapes of illegal immigrants from centres of detention, airily described by the media as demonstrations for freedom, should be a matter of concern to Government, Opposition and the Maltese public at large. After a mass breakout of over 100 immigrants from Safi and Hal Far last month, the more recent "walkabout" by some 80 detainees to the airport and back, together with repeated breakouts and escapes by smaller bands of men, expose our amateurish approach. Unfortunately, this attitude now seems to have pervaded even the army and the police.

The "authorities" - a word used as a protective label when referring to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister - are trying to put a brave face on this repeated mass defiance of Maltese law. The media are helping them by emphasising that these incidents were all the time "under control" and that eventually all immigrants were shepherded back to the compounds. Every time they add semi-apologetically that no one was hurt, as if this were a condition for maintaining law and order.

Maltese law

According to Maltese law, any escape from a place of detention, especially when accompanied by the breaking of doors, gates, fences and so on, is a criminal offence punishable with imprisonment from two to four years (sections 150, 151 and 160 of the Criminal Code). Individual escapees have been condemned for such offences and their conviction in the Magistrates Courts upheld by the Court of Appeal (See most recently The Police vs Mohammed Tensi, Appeal No. 257/05, January 19).

Yet viewers of the national TV station were astonished to hear Lt Col. Brian Gatt, the new head of the detention centres, saying recently that no action was contemplated against the detainees who broke out of the centres as they were only illegal immigrants. Is this official Government policy or just an aberration of Lt Col. Gatt? Do the authorities mean that one person will be judged and sent to prison for breaking the law, but the breach of the same law by an organised group of persons will be condoned? If that is so, it would make more sense for the authorities to amend the law and exempt illegal immigrants from the provisions of the Criminal Code.

The more recent pronouncements of the head of the Armed Forces (The Times, March 7,) were even more alarming. Brigadier Carmel Vassallo admitted that, at the previous day's escape, the few soldiers present could do nothing except accompany the escapees on their "walkabout". But surely if the guards were outnumbered, the other one thousand or so soldiers stationed in Safi, Hal Far and Luqa Barracks could have sprung into action within minutes to halt the walkabout and maintain law and order. What else are they paid for? Can one imagine a situation where all convicts at Corradino decided to break out and were allowed to stage a demonstration in front of the Auberge de Castille?

Brigadier Vassallo went one better in an interview with Malta Today (March 5). He was quoted as saying: "Yesterday they stopped at Luqa. Today, tomorrow, whenever, a group can decide to keep marching on to Valletta. What will we do then when they reach City Gate? Castille? The Palace?"

The obvious answer is that 1,000 members of the armed forces should never allow a group of illegal immigrants to come anywhere near Valletta or the airport or any other sensitive place on the island, if only they are allowed to do their duty and not ordered to keep their hands behind their backs.

A message?

But then Brigadier Vassallo may be trying to send a message. Maybe there is more than meets the eye in the attitude of the armed forces and the police. The Depasquale report informed us that they are often the subject of insults and aggressive behaviour by illegal immigrants, who should be more grateful. Now we discover they run more serious risks.

In reply to a parliamentary question by Labour MP Joe Debono Grech (March 7, PQ 17,371), the Prime Minister revealed that "a small number" of soldiers working with illegal immigrants were found to be "strongly positive, that is, they had in some way contracted the microbe of TB mute".

The small number turns out to be 32 out of 680 or about five per cent. TB was eradicated from Malta in the 1950s. Should we release illegal immigrants on the unsuspecting Maltese population at the risk that five per cent of those coming in contact with them ("a small number"!) would get infected? Suppose the small number included you and me and our children?

The media have not been tender with the forces of law and order. After the incidents of January 2005, they savaged the armed forces, who tried to restore order, without criticising the illegal immigrants who were in breach of the law. Indeed, the media vilified Judge Depasquale for writing his report (which in some cases they had not read) without uttering a word of condemnation of the illegal immigrants and their mentors.

The authorities did not act wisely either in subjecting the armed forces to the harrowing experience of a board of enquiry after the incidents of January 2005.

Army personnel may not be very keen now to be put under investigation again for showing determination in controlling detainees. Maybe that is why they put their hands behind their backs and let things take their course.

Will they do so in the near future if a group of illegal but well-advised immigrants targets our most vulnerable spot, that is, the tourist industry? Let us make no mistake about these protests, starting with the one of January 2005. They do not just happen; they are planned, well planned and follow a pattern.

Is it not time the authorities made everybody bear his share of responsibility in the matter? For political reasons, Libya has been allowing large numbers of Sub-Saharan Africans onto its territory, knowing their ultimate destination is Europe. It has also allowed criminal organisations of traffickers in human beings to flourish in the country.

Italy has made it a habit of directing the Maltese armed forces towards seacraft in distress within Malta's search and rescue area. In some cases these craft were not in distress and/or not in Malta's area.

In any case, search and rescue obligations apply to craft which are in distress for bona fide reasons. It is doubtful whether a legal obligation arises in the case of craft which have knowingly put themselves in a situation of 'distress' and broke a number of laws, national and international, in so doing.

The rest is internal politics, which should obey the national interest as seen by the thinking, tax-paying and voting public - that is, all of us. Does public opinion support the policies towards illegal immigrants that the authorities have followed in the past three or four years?