When national interests cannot come first

I refer to Victor Ragonesi's letter of April 24, National Interest Comes First.

I agree completely with Dr Ragonesi that on issues of major national interests there should be no equivocation. We should stand and be counted. Our known position against all forms of abortion is indeed of major national importance and Malta should show no sign of hesitation in upholding these principles even against all odds and at the risk of being ridiculed by the Liberals in Europe and elsewhere. This has happened to Italian Culture Minister Rocco Buttilgione when his name was submitted by the Italian government for consideration as a European Commissioner in 2005. The European Parliament threatened to veto the entire proposed Commission to show its displeasure with Mr Buttilgione because he continued to uphold his Christian values when his candidature was being discussed by the assembly. In these circumstances, the Italian government had no other alternative but to withdraw his name and replace it by that of Franco Frattini. However, I find the argument by Dr Ragonesi that the Commission would bow its head when confronted with issues of "national interests" as untenable. The countries quoted by Dr Ragonesi in his letter are old members of the EU and are subject to a different criteria from that of new member countries (such as Malta).

In 1998, soon after the restart of negotiations on Malta's accession to the EU, I was one in a delegation of Maltese senior civil servants who headed to Brussels to discuss various issues with our counterparts in the Commission on matters pertaining to justice and home affairs.

One of the issues discussed was whether Malta should ratify some of the outstanding articles of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. When in 1971 Dr Borg-Olivier as Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs signed the instrument of accession to the Convention he did so with some reservations to a number of important articles in the Convention on the grounds of Malta's "own special problems, its peculiar positions and characteristics". The Maltese delegation at Brussels in 1998 initially maintained the same position taken by Malta in 1971 stating that in view of our country's small size, its situation in the centre of the Mediterranean and critical economic development, Malta was still not in a position to take on an unlimited influx of refugees as would be the case if the Convention was fully ratified. To strengthen our argument we pointed out that some of the most prominent members of the EU had also maintained (and were at that time still maintaining) these reservations (and others) in the said Refugees Convention.

The EU representatives brusquely brushed away our arguments stating that we as new members would have to comply with all existing rules and regulations and that what was applicable to old members was not necessarily applicable to new members.

Old members had come in under a different set of rules and new members were getting in under a new set of rules that were not negotiable if they were of a mandatory nature, as was the case with the said articles of the UN Refugees Convention.