A group of young people hailing from Malta, Africa and Asia have been invited to dinner at the Curia by Archbishop Charles Scicluna as part of an effort to promote inclusion and tolerance.

Titled ‘A good neighbourhood dinner’, the event will be held on June 11, and an estimated 60 youths will be present, half of whom migrants. Mgr Scicluna announced this initiative when addressing academics, migrants and students during a dialogue session at University organised by the Faculty for Social Well-being.

“We need to invite each other to share our narratives and our story. But we also need to invite our friends, especially from Africa and Asia, to be part of our celebrations,” the Archbishop said.

The dialogue session was organised in the wake of the murder of Lassana Cisse from the Ivory Coast, who was shot dead last month in cold blood along a road in Ħal Far. Two young soldiers have been charged with racially motivated murder.

Mgr Scicluna noted that when the victim came to Malta, he had been aided by the Malta Emigrants Commission with the processing of his papers.

“Unfortunately, he ended up with one of the more difficult decisions and labels. He was known as a ‘rejected’. That was the story of Lassana. We gave him that label; our institutions and our legislation gave him that label. He was rejected. We are here because in the end he was physically eliminated,” he said.

The Archbishop added that this story was a trajectory of rejection and elimination which needed to be addressed, albeit not the only one.

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