A group of migrants the government had threatened to push back to Libya last year should have taken their case to the Maltese courts, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
The Strasbourg court yesterday dismissed an application from 102 migrants against the Maltese government, claiming they should have exhausted any local channels before involving the ECHR. Ironically, through an injunction, it was the same European court which had blocked any potential attempt to send the migrants back to Africa.
The case dates back to July 2013, when the Maltese government had considered sending a boatload of Somali migrants back to Libya without having processed their claims for asylum, a move that would have violated their human rights.
The migrants had been intercepted in an inflatable vessel which was taking in water, just one nautical mile from the Maltese coast.
Though officially stating that it was “considering all options”, the Maltese government was known to have started making plans for an Air Malta plane to fly them back to Libya.
The move had sparked outrage among activists and NGOs, before the European court intervened following an application for injunction that was filed by a group of four human rights lawyers.
Had the government gone ahead with the deportation, it could have faced a much harsher reaction from the court. Back in 2012, the Italian government was ordered to pay some €330,000 to each of the 22 migrants it had deported, following a case before the same court.
In a 30-page judgment, the European court yesterday, however, unanimously decided that since the migrants had not been immediately sent back to Libya, they were able to resort to the Maltese courts to obtain redress against their alleged treatment.
Aditus director Neil Falzon, who was among the lawyers who had filed the injunction to block the pushback, said he was not particularly disappointed by the outcome.
He said the main purpose of the case was to block what the legal team had deemed to be an illegal pushback, and this had succeeded.
“Our main concern was twofold. The first was stopping the pushback, and we succeeded in that. The second was raising national and international awareness on this issue, which we did too,” he said.
The court did not focus exclusively on the 102 migrants but expressed its doubts on accessibility to local legal proceedings for migrants in Malta in general.
The judgment highlighted access to legal aid as a main obstacle for migrants on the island.
In this case, however, the court found the migrants had enjoyed access to a number of NGO lawyers, but had still not even attempted to take any legal action locally.
Dr Falzon said the legal team had not yet decided whether or not to take any action locally and it had not yet consulted its clients.
The court said it had also considered that more than half the migrants had since been granted subsidiary protection, one was given temporary humanitarian protection, and 21 were still awaiting a final decision following their appeal from a refusal of asylum status.
The remaining 14 are still awaiting a decision on their asylum claim.