Minister reconsidering media ban on detention centres

Justice and Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici will be considering whether to retain the government's policy to ban the media from detention centres.

The news follows yet another report by an international organis-ation, this time the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), which criticised the conditions in detention centres, albeit indirectly.

The ERCI hit out at the detention policy itself, saying it affected migrants' rights and fuelled racism.

The government strongly reacted to the report, saying the ECRI was not appreciating the scale of the crisis faced by Malta in this regard. It rebutted the report's comments made on detention centres, insisting that maintenance at centres was being carried out on an ongoing basis but that sometimes vandalism and lack of interest shown by a minority of the immigrants contributed towards the degradation of physical conditions.

The press has, again, been faced with an agency making claims it cannot verify independently because it has been government policy to ban media presence in the centres.

When questioned about the access of the press to the centres, Dr Mifsud Bonnici said: "I intend considering this thing (the ban on the media's access to detention centres) but right now I am taking over both the detention centres and the open centres to see exactly what there is and take action accordingly."

An eye-opening tour, which revealed the largely sub-standard conditions the immigrants were being kept in, was held for the media back in 2006. But since then, no journalist was able to verify the improvement in the living conditions of immigrants which the government claims to have taken place.