The incidents we witnessed at a migrants’ detention centre last Tuesday were not new, but they have once again raised pertinent questions the government will almost certainly choose to ignore.
Detained migrants interrupted a planned visit by MPs to highlight their plight and caused a racket. Of course, the way they did it – by smashing up furniture and pelting the police – is condemnable.
But one needs to ask two questions: were the police too heavy-handed in dealing with the unrest, and more importantly, can anything be done to avoid a repeat?
Though the police commissioner came up with arguments to back up the decision to use a taser gun and rubber pellets, the facts emerging after the incident showed the riot police called in probably adopted unnecessarily heavy-handed tactics.
The police commissioner said that, with the exception of just two migrants, the rest gave up “immediately” once the police moved in. Footage shot by video journalists showed migrants being pushed to the ground and handcuffed when they were offering no resistance.
The Home Affairs Minister has ordered an “independent” inquiry into the incident but the board of inquiry’s composition has all the hallmarks of a whitewash, similar to the inquiry into the 2005 Safi incidents. As the saying goes, the more things change the more they remain the same.
Governments may bank on public animosity towards black migrants to justify its forces’ actions, but ultimately, Tuesday’s incident manifested once again all that is wrong with Malta’s mandatory detention policy. Locking up people who have committed no crime for up to 18 months with no right of appeal is doing nothing more than criminalising them in the eyes of the public.
It builds the perception among Maltese that these people have done something wrong.
To be fair, there is no obvious solution to the way we should deal with asylum seekers until their application is processed. Speeding up the application process and putting migrants in detention for a limited period before putting them in open centres manned by NGOs could be a start, but no government seems willing to take such a politically delicate decision.
On the contrary, detention remains one of the few policies the two main political parties agree upon – what do you expect from political parties who are prepared to compromise migrants’ human rights for the sake of voters?
The naked truth is that the unreasonable length of detention is harmful on all counts. It costs the country a lot of money to house them and monitor them.
Detention causes untold frustration and suffering (studies have shown they are a hub for mental illness) for immigrants who simply cannot understand why they are being cooped up inside a jail, their only crime being that they fled from political persecution or economic strife. Besides, after the detention term, most of them are going to be released anyway.
Also, detention has proved to be no deterrent to the number of immigrants arriving in Malta. African migrants land in Malta by accident; they don’t want to be here, pure and simple. Wouldn’t society be better off if they are working and paying taxes until their application is determined? Wouldn’t our soldiers be better off if they are utilised for other matters and let NGOs, who have the knowhow, do the job instead?
One year into his term in office, isn’t it time for Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia to stop refusing to engage with NGOs on the issue of detention?
So many questions with logical answers, but there is clearly no political goodwill where detention is concerned.