Calls for the creation of a legal pathway for the regularisation of non-returnable migrants who made Malta their home should be heeded, the Justice and Peace Commission and the Emigrants’ Commission said.

This would allow them to live with dignity and achieve their full potential. This was one of the proposals they made in a document they issued to mark World Day of Social Justice today.

The commissions said that since the theme chosen by the United Nations “Workers on the Move: the Quest for Social Justice” focused on migration, they wanted their document to reflect how to make Malta’s laws and policies on migration and asylum more just, by putting people at the centre.

The document calls upon the government to implement a number of measures, which would go some way towards ensuring more equitable treatment of migrants and refugees.

These included the creation of a strong legal framework to protect migrant workers, particularly in a context where their recruitment and employment was facilitated to encourage economic growth, to ensure that they were not treated simply as cheap, disposable labour.

Another proposal was for the needs of beneficiaries of protection to be taken into account for their stability and full inclusion in society, and for the amendment of citizenship laws to facilitate these people’s access to citizenship.

Beneficiaries of subsidiary protection, they said, should be granted the right to be reunited with their families in Malta. For it was impossible for people to rebuild their lives if a part of them was in another country, possibly at risk of harm.

The commissions said that while these recommendations were primarily addressed at the government as the entity with power to effect the necessary legislative changes, it was the duty of all Christians to work for justice.

They called on people to work to promote justice towards migrants and refugees in their daily lives, especially during lent, by:

1. Combating indifference, questioning lifestyle choices and becoming more attuned to the needs of others;

2. Welcoming strangers – renouncing defensiveness, fear and indifference and opening hearts, communities and parishes to migrants and refugees;

3. Upholding the dignity of migrants and refugees by: ensuring that all dealings with them were characterised by respect and justice; standing against intolerance, prejudice, racism and xenophobia; and recognising every migrant and refugee as a person;

4. Working to achieve true equality by ensuring that the structural causes of poverty and injustice were addressed by those with the power to do so.

While acknowledging the difficulties inherent in this battle for social justice, the document encouraged readers not to lose hope.

Read the commissions' document in the pdf link below.