Malta's two detention centres, currently housing hundreds of illegal immigrants, will on Friday be under the spotlight when a delegation of MEPs visits the island in order to draw up a report on illegal immigration.
This will be the first visit by the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee to Malta following similar visits to Lampedusa, Libya and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa.
The delegation will be headed by the vice president of the committee, Italian MEP Stefano Zappala, and will also include the two Maltese Nationalist MEPs David Casa and Simon Busuttil, French MEPs Patrick Gaubert and Martine Roure, Cypriot MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides and Italian MEPs Romano La Russa and Giusto Catania, who has lately been lobbying for the closure of all detention centres in the EU.
The delegation is expected to hold discussions with Justice and Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg and the Minister for Family and Social Solidarity Dolores Cristina.
It will also meet NGOs involved in the sector including the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Emigrants' Commission and the Office of the Commissioner of Refugees. Sources close to the European Parliament said the current detention policy was likely to be one of the main topics issues by the MEPs.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had raised the same issue with the EU, complaining that the Maltese detain nearly all asylum-seekers and migrants who arrive here. According to the UNHCR, detention should be the exception and not the rule.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Dr Busuttil, who last year headed a European Parliament delegation to Libya on illegal immigration, presented his report to the Civil Liberties Committee.
He said MEPs concluded that Libya was not in a position to deter illegal immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean to reach EU territory and thus the EU needed to engage in discussions with the Libyan authorities to agree on joint cooperation.
He said the delegation would like to further investigate the situation of Libya's detention centres in the south of the country and asked the committee to grant it a mandate to visit again.
Dr Busuttil suggested the report be discussed at a plenary session of the European Parliament with a possibility of drawing up a motion for resolution.