The Refugee Commission granted refugee status to 20 people in the first five months of this year, as many as had been granted throughout 2009.

Speaking at a conference on the asylum process on the occasion of World Refugee Day, Refugee Commissioner Mario Friggieri said the number of people who applied for asylum kept rising every year, forcing his office to increase staff members five-fold.

In 2002, he said, only 36 per cent of the 1,686 people who arrived in Malta illegally applied for protection. This percentage continued to increase year on year until it reached a peak in 2008 when 98 per cent of the 2,775 immigrants applied for asylum. Last year, this percentage dropped slightly to 89 per cent of the 1,476 people applying for asylum.

He said Malta was receiving 6.5 asylum applications for every 1,000 inhabitants, 13 times the EU average and, by far, the country which received the largest number of applications.

In the first five months of this year, the commission rejected 84 applications and 884 applications were rejected last year.

Those whose application was rejected should have been repatriated but Justice Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici pointed out that Malta, like other countries, was struggling to put in place an effective and ongoing return programme but only managed to offer assisted voluntary return. "There can be no protection regime for migrants without an efficient return regime working in parallel," he stressed.

"Assisted voluntary return remains an interesting alternative, never a solution for the majority but something we must exploit to its fullest. It is a win-win situation for Malta and for the persons who venture to try it," he said.

In parallel, he said Malta had collaborated with Frontex and a new programme presently in operation, Melita 2010, was set up specifically to allow the speedier and humane return of migrants who were not entitled to either refugee or humanitarian status.

Referring to the number of immigrants arriving at Malta's shores, most of whom applied for asylum, Dr Mifsud Bonnici said: "No other country within the EU has endured what we have."

"Despite the difficulties we went through and despite those instances when we were vilified by certain NGOs, we have considered every asylum case as the particular story of a human being who is entitled to his fundamental human rights which, after all, we have always guaranteed."

Dr Mifsud Bonnici explained how Malta, despite having been left on its own "for a good part of the road", had still been able to put in place a national policy, strategies and an infrastructure to respond to and cope with a phenomenon in which it had no previous experience.

He thanked the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for having taken steps that had allowed Malta to increase the rhythm of its resettlement programmes both to the US and to a number of European partners, particularly France.