House Social Affairs Committee chair Deborah Schembri said yesterday the government was trying to acquire funds to build “appropriate” reception and detention facilities for irregular migrants landing in Malta.

She told the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention the government was aware that the current facilities were simply the result of crisis management. She said that in Malta, over half of those who apply for refugee status get it. This was an excellent humanitarian record for Malta.

The chairman of the UN working group, Setondji Roland Adjovi, said that while the group had seen improvement, there were aspects which needed to be ad-dressed, such as improvement in slines of communication between legal aid and applicants. He said if the country employed detention, there had to be a legal basis which could be challenged in court.