Miep Gies, Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler and Bep Voskuijl. These people broke the law in Amsterdam in 1942. Their crime? They hid the 13-year-old Anne Frank and her Jewish family from the authorities. The Nazis eventually found out and deported the Frank family to the legally constituted concentration camps.
All the members of the Frank family died, except Anne’s father, Otto.
Millions of other Jewish people and persons considered inferior by the Nazi regime died in the concentration camps. After the war, facing criminal charges, a number of Nazi officers said they had followed legitimate orders. They said they had done nothing illegal. As a meme on social media succinctly put it, those hiding Anne Frank broke the law, those who killed her didn’t. Sometimes the law is an ass.
Laws are meant to protect people, especially vulnerable members of society. When we start enforcing or creating laws to hurt people, or to allow people to suffer, then we are abusing the very concept of law. We are creating a legal washing machine to clean a dirty conscience, just like the officers did in the Nuremberg trials.
This is what is happening in the Mediterranean and sad to say, also in Malta. We are citing the law to justify the growing cemeteries in the bottom of our surrounding sea. We are looking at legal texts instead of looking at the suffering and death of men, women and children.
It would be foolhardy of me or anyone not to recognise that irregular migration presents a challenge to the receiving communities. But let us for a second consider what we are talking about.
Migration, irregular or otherwise, has been around since the birth of humankind. Our nomadic instincts are rooted in those early days. From the dawn of time, humans have moved around to find new hunting grounds, more fertile land, more safe and secure surroundings. While some communities settled and built villages, towns and cities, others continued to roam. The nomadic nature of humankind led to the proliferation of our race and to the creation of different civilisations.
People today move around to find better jobs, a more secure environment – basically to get a better shot at life. Some move within their own countries, others seek opportunities abroad. Some do it legally, others are forced to do it illegally. They are forced to move because of war, because of famine, because of drought, because of the systematic failure of the rule of law in their home country, because of the manner with which the raw materials in their country are siphoned off to feed the rich.
Unfortunately, we in the developed world pick up the story at this end, when the person is fleeing. We ignore all that happens before
How does a young father respond to all these natural and man-made calamities? I am quite sure that if he had the option of donning a Superman cape and solving all these problems he would. But without this option, the only remaining realistic option is for him and his family to flee.
Unfortunately, we in the developed world pick up the story at this end, when the person is fleeing. We ignore all that happens before. We become lawyers and policemen, forgetting in the process that we are also humans. And we do all we can to stop these people for looking for a better future. And we give them instead an eternal resting place in the bottom of the sea.
Times of Malta was correct. It is ironic that in the same days that Parliament is debating the Good Samaritan Act, we as a nation are closing our ports to people who want nothing except a shot at life. It is ironic that while we are selling passports to millionaires, we are stopping migrants from entering our safe harbours. It is ironic that while we are saying that we want to import tens of thousands of workers we arraigned the captain of a ship that rescued migrants. If this captain was breaking the law, then the law is an ass.
We have to ask ourselves whether we want to put our humanity above everything else or whether we want to be Maltese first. I cringed when I heard Donald Trump use that phrase ‘America First’. Our world needs less and not more of this pseudo-patriotic, nationalistic rhetoric.
As a liberal, I would like to see the world liberated of borders that box our humanity instead of setting it free. I want to see a world that not only shares pictures of children laying dead on the sand but does something to stop this kind of tragedy. I want to live in a country that is not only hospitable in name but also in nature.
We have an opportunity to be bigger than ourselves by actually being human in a world that is increasingly soulless.
As a lawyer and politician, it hurts me to see politics and law used and abused to hurt others. It worries me that in the minds of many, the drowning, the suffering, the pain is perfectly acceptable because it is legal. Benjamin Franklin said: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
I hope that one day we will all share the same outrage.
Mario de Marco is a Nationalist Party MP.