Pope Francis’s call for compassion for migrants was one of a magistrate’s considerations as he decided not to jail a Liberian man caught with forged Italian documents.
Magistrate Joseph Mifsud dedicated several paragraphs of his three-page judgment to recent speeches delivered by Pope Francis on the plight of immigration, in which he highlighted their difficulties and called for compassion.
The Liberian national residing in Naples, Matthew Richmond, was caught at the Malta International Airport on Thursday as he tried to enter Malta with false documents.
The 31-year-old was found in possession of an Italian identity card, an Italian residence permit and an Italian ‘aliens’ passport which were all forged. The man admitted the charges.
They were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death
But in his judgment, the magistrate did not limit himself to domestic and European case law. He also quoted the Pontiff calling for compassion for migrants who “were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace.
“They were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death. How often do such people fail to find understanding, fail to find acceptance, fail to find solidarity,” the Pope had told the people of Lampedusa during a visit in July 2013.
The magistrate quoted the part of the Pope’s speech that called for “charity and cooperation”.
After considering this and the agreement by the prosecution and the defence on a non-effective jail term, the magistrate jailed Mr Richmond for a year but suspended it for two years.
This was not the first time that the newly-appointed magistrate has departed from case law in his judgments. In one of his first decisions, Magistrate Mifsud even quoted Gozo Bishop Mario Grech while in a more recent decision, also on the issue of immigration, he quoted Pope John Paul’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate on respect for migrants’ human rights.