A human rights activist who came up with the idea of raising €650,000 to buy a Maltese passport for the “most deserving” asylum seeker has had an online crowd-funding scheme approved.
Antoine Cassar’s project – inspired by the controversial cash-for citizens’ scheme – got the seal of approval from verkami.com, a respected website that supports artists and helps to finance projects collectively to raise money.
However, the project – which is “partly a political protest” and “partly a collective show of solidarity” – is not live yet.
“I’m waiting for the regulations to be agreed on and published, to see what the exact conditions for an application will be,” Mr Cassar, a writer and human rights campaigner based in Luxembourg said.
He explained that the amount of money required may end up being more than the €650,000 and the €7,500 ‘due diligence’ fee. Moreover, the new regulations might also require the applicant to own property or investment.
“An asylum seeker in Malta who has no permission to work unless they find an employer ready to sponsor them is unlikely to be a property owner or an investor in national bonds,” Mr Cassar said. If the new regulations pertaining to the IIP scheme include such conditions, then the details of the crowdfunding project would have to be re-thought.
Malta setting itself up as a boutique offering over-the-counter passports to tycoons
On Friday, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat gave the strongest signal yet that the government is prepared to accept changes to the cash-for citizens’ scheme.
Mr Cassar believes that the new proposals would be an improvement from the point of view of the economy, for concerns on issues of national security, identity and roots.
“But from the point of view of someone who is not an ‘ultra-high net worth individual’, those new conditions will simply add more insult to injury,” he said. “Our Prime Minister recently spoke of the Mediterranean Sea turning into a cemetery. The unnamed graves have been piling up for over a decade, and in the midst of the cemetery, Malta is setting itself up as a boutique offering over-the-counter EU passports to tycoons with plenty of euros to spare,” Mr Cassar said.
Even if the funds are not raised, at least a message has been sent out, said Mr Cassar.
The sale of citizenship, whatever the conditions, continues to cement the walls of global apartheid, and does not take into account the needs of people who suffer precisely due to the fact that they enjoy no freedom of movement.
He applauded a suggestion by Mgr Philip Calleja, Emigrants’ Commission director, to grant ‘alien’ passports to asylum seekers in Malta who have had their application for protection wrongly rejected. “It’s a step in the right direction, even if the term ‘alien passport’ is highly unfortunate: are we not residents of the same planet?”
Integra Foundation have since offered their support to the project and if it goes through will be helping in the identification of the asylum seeker most deserving of receiving the money to purchase citizenship.