In February of last year a landmark judgment by the Strasbourg court ruled that the Italian government had violated migrants’ human rights when it sent them back to Libya without first reviewing their asylum applications.
The case, which referred to the Berlusconi-era push-back agreement with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, concerned the case of 11 Somali and 13 Eritrean nationals. They filed a complaint on behalf of a group of 200 migrants, including children and pregnant women, who left Libya in 2009 and were shipped back shortly after having been rescued 35 miles south of Lampedusa.
But the ruling set a precedent and established what the UN Human Rights Agency (UNHCR) and several NGOs had been saying all along, even when the previous administration tacitly supported the Italian agreement with Libya.
The new Government’s decision brings back that fight for these NGOs and citizens concerned with the rights of African migrants in Malta, with the prospect of Malta perpetrating a breach of international law after such an unequivocal decision by the court of human rights.
A coalition of rights NGOs made precisely this point but also pointed to the precarious situation in Libya, where the dust is still unsettled more than a year after the revolution that overthrew Gaddafi.
“The action contemplated by the Government is precisely what the Prime Minister says it is not: it is a push-back, sending people who have come to our shores to seek well-deserved refuge, back to a country where they may well be killed,” the coalition said.
Reports of ill-treatment and discrimination against black African migrants always abounded among the people who landed in Malta and described their stay in the North African state. However, since the revolution, the situation, in many respects, has got worse.
The militias that survive from the revolution have taken over a number of detention centres and the Libyan authorities do not have full control over the system.
“That the migrants will face gross human rights abuses if returned to Libya is a certainty: those we met detailed the abuses they faced, especially in detention, among them brutal beatings and shootings, which left some permanently disabled. Those who return to Libya after attempting to reach Europe are singled out for especially harsh punishment,” the group said.
In fact, the development comes less than two weeks after the Constitutional Court ruled that the rights of two Somali migrants to freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment had been violated by their forced repatriation in 2004.
The Somalis had arrived in Malta from Libya with 23 other people in October 2004 and were flown back to Tripoli with three others one month later.
On their arrival in Libya, the men were arrested, beaten and tortured by the Libyan authorities before being driven into the desert and abandoned there.
They were rescued by nomads and eventually made their way back to Tripoli and then on to Malta, where they arrived in June 2006.
The men filed a case against the government in the first hall of the civil court and won but the Government appealed the ruling. However, on June 29, the Constitutional Court upheld the judgement, though it lowered their compensation from €16,000 to €10,000.