[attach id=265332 size="medium"]Protesters from the NGOs outside Police Headquarters yesterday. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi[/attach]
A Government plan to send back to Libya a group of Somali asylum seekers was blocked yesterday hours before their unscheduled Air Malta flight, following an interim ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.
An urgent application had earlier been filed in the name of a coalition of 11 NGOs after the Government made known its intention to push back a group of Somali migrants who had been rescued early in the morning.
Lawyer Michael Camilleri broke the news outside the police headquarters in Floriana in the afternoon as dozens of people gathered to “stop the trucks” from taking migrants to the airport.
He said an application had been filed under Rule 39 of the European Court of Human Rights to issue an “interim measure” to prohibit the deportation and this had been accepted.
“We still need to see the details of this decree but the news is that the Government is inhibited from sending the migrants back,” he said to applause from the protestors.
The action was followed by a judicial protest filed by 70 lawyers and presented to the press outside court yesterday.
This is not push-back, it is a signal that we are not pushovers
The plan was to deport most of a group of Somalis who landed yesterday morning – everyone barring children and their families, pregnant women and other vulnerable people. That would have worked out to a group of between 60 and 70 migrants from 102, among them 41 women and two babies, who were spotted on a dinghy off Delimara at 6am.
The group was expected to be flown back to Tripoli’s Mitiga military airport with two Air Malta flights at midnight and 4am.
Speaking in Parliament yesterday evening, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said a final decision had not been taken on whether to send the migrants back but insisted that his government was considering all options and that he was not “bluffing”.
Earlier he had told Times of Malta: “This is not push-back, it is a signal that we are not pushovers”.
Later in Parliament he said he was personally shouldering the consequences of the decision, which he understood to come at a political cost. However, his government had come to this juncture after being faced with a context of an “enormous flux” in the past days.
National Security Minister Manuel Mallia later gave a detailed briefing of the last 48 hours and indicated that more than 1,000 irregular immigrants were believed to have made the crossing from Libya during this short period.
Of these, Malta took 102 yesterday but more came in last night: 68 migrants, including a newborn baby, were brought ashore after being intercepted close to Malta.
A pregnant woman was airlifted from another boat to hospital for treatment.
Both the Prime Minister and Dr Mallia tried to mitigate the outcry from NGOs and the EU, whose Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmstrom, warned that any push-back of migrants would be illegal.
But Dr Muscat used Ms Malmstrom’s statement as a small victory, claiming that immigration was not on the EU’s agenda before the Government announced that it was toying with the idea of sending back migrants yesterday. Now, the Commission was talking of wanting to discuss the matter, Dr Muscat said, referring to the EU statement on the matter.
Nonetheless, Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil and his deputy Mario de Marco reacted fiercely.
“What is being done is condemnable on a moral and a political level, especially after Pope’s visit to Lampedusa,” Dr Busuttil said, referring to Pope Francis’s “globalisation of indifference” on the Mediterranean island.
He pledged the Opposition’s help in discussions with international bodies at the EU but only if the Government respected human rights, stressing that the Labour administration would not send people back to Libya in the PN’s name.
“We will not be accomplices in breaches of human rights,” Dr Busuttil insisted.