Malta cannot save people’s lives at sea and then treat them like animals, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said yesterday, promising a thorough review of the detention policy that “failed”.
He said that while a period of detention had to be maintained because people reaching Malta’s shores illegally had to be treated as illegal migrants, the length and quality of Malta’s detention policy had to be reviewed because it was “counterproductive”.
Dr Muscat was addressing the last in a series of Gvern li Jismà (a government that listens) events where government ministers take questions from the public. He was asked about the way forward following the publication of an inquiry into the death of 32-year-old Mamadou Kamara in 2012 at the hands of detention services officers.
The inquiry, by retired judge Geoffrey Valenzia, is damning about the detention policy and highlights shortcomings and abuses within the system. It also revealed that former home affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici had stopped disciplinary action from being taken against officers involved in the death of a second migrant, just a year before.
Although Dr Mifsud Bonnici is contesting this, Dr Muscat said yesterday responsibility had to be shouldered on two levels: the political responsibility by those who stopped disciplinary action from being taken and by those who decided that the inquiry should not be made public.
‘Neutrality of the island is serving the country well’
NGOs who work with migrants condemned “every single person who read this report, failed to act and chose to remain silent” since it was finalised in December 2012.
They noted that, in the wake of Mr Kamara’s death, under the previous administration, the Office of the Prime Minister had engaged in a review of the detention regime. That dialogue came to a halt after the election, the NGOs said, recommending that this government would take up where the authorities left off with the review.
Dr Muscat said yesterday this would be the task of newly-appointed Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela.
NGOs insisted yesterday (see story, left) the situation remained as pressing as ever.
“Keeping them in those conditions for such a long time is counterproductive,” Dr Muscat stressed at the Siġġiewi activity.
He spoke on the number of migrants arriving in Malta, arguing that the drop was “not a coincidence” but a result of heightened cooperation with Italy.
He touched upon the presence of extreme groups like ISIS in Libya, saying Malta’s neutrality was serving the country well in its efforts to address “the problem, not crisis, on Malta’s doorstep”.
Replying to a question on the aftermath of the shooting involving Paul Sheehan, the driver of the former home affairs minister, and the way the government dealt with the matter, Dr Muscat said Labour had “raised the bar” on the accountability of politicians, adding it understood that “people expected better from us”.
“When I talk to people, they tell me the government is doing well politically and economically but that, at times, we may appear arrogant. If people say this, then they are really feeling it, so we humbly accept this criticism and work to address these issues,” he said.