News • November 16 2003

The cost of immigration: Lm476 a day spent by army forces alone

Asylum seekers kept waiting up to eleven months

Matthew Vella
It costs an average of Lm1.30 every day for an asylum seeker to be housed and fed at the Armed Forces of Malta’s compounds, which today house 364 migrants at the Lyster and Safi barracks. The total bill, since January of this year, has now escalated to Lm135,367 for the AFM, or Lm476 a day on average, to accommodate the constant flow of asylum seekers that enter Maltese waters.
Since 2002, over 2,000 hopeful asylum seekers have landed on Maltese shores, most probably let off on a ravaged dinghy just outside the island’s territorial waters, having departed on a powerboat from a Libyan port, their life savings poured into the pocket of a human trafficker. Only 350 asylum seekers arrived in Malta this year, apart from the 148 Egyptians who were flown in from Italy to Malta to be repatriated back to Egypt. They had told the AFM they were on their way to Italy and did not want to be taken ashore. The patrol boat let them off with fuel and supplies.
The fate of the asylum seekers in Malta has not been wonderful. A number of asylum seekers have been waiting up to eleven months in one of the detention compounds run by army or police forces, to have their application for refugee status heard in front of the Refugee Commission (RC). They spend their days waiting. Women and children especially, have no outlets, save for the measly two hours a day strolling outside the camps, maybe for a game of football.
But they are guarded under the watchful eyes of army and police officials from behind the fences at the camps, and wait, patiently, for their applications to be reviewed and processed by a refugee commission headed by part-timers.
It is, in fact, the Curia PRO, Charles Buttigieg, who heads the RC, and whose appeals board is presided over by University of Malta history professor Henry Frendo. They are aided by two principal officers and a clerk, who run the RC office at St Elmo in Valletta. According to the Home Affairs Ministry, the RC has intensified its activities of late, especially taking the opportunity of the lull in migrant arrivals.
But the waiting list remains long for the five-man operation: 157 applications are currently pending at the RC, 60 of which are asylum seekers who have been waiting for anything between six and eleven months to appear in front of it. Those who have been waiting for less than six months number 89. And the situation weighs heavily for unaccompanied minors, who have to wait to come of age until they can make a formal request for refugee status.
But NGOs have already warned about the long periods of detention and cramped conditions of the police and army compounds which today host 549 asylum seekers: 364 at the AFM barracks and 185 at the SAG’s Ta’Kandja compound and the Hal-Far immigration centre, both run by the police. The result of long-term detention can turn into tragedy, as when last week an Algerian national who had already been refused refugee status, was found hung at the Police GHQ in Floriana.
In short, NGOs say the RC is too small to command the effective processing of all applications. And with Ombudsman Joe Sammut having already warned against the inability to host emergency arrivals to Malta, it can only be another boatful of asylum seekers to truly expose the inadequacy of the Maltese infrastructure.
The situation in Malta is so critical that the matter has also reached the European Parliament, through the intervention of Green MEP Hélène Flautre, who has asked the Council of Ministers whether it is aware of the "worrying situation" in Malta. Flautre said asylum seekers were being detained in "deplorable, if not wretched, conditions for periods of up to 18 months" and that they are "being held without being given any information on the likely outcome of their cases."
Flautre has now asked the Council whether such a situation is in breach of international law, and in particular the European Human Rights Convention and the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, and what the Council will be doing to ensure Malta complies with its international obligations and the existing body of Union legislation in the sphere.
The scores of applications that are refused are usually appealed by the applicants, but the appeals board, which this year gave its verdict on some 190 applications, rarely finds objection to the RC’s own decision. A notable discrepancy, NGOs claim, is that applicants are entitled to legal aid at the application phase only if they can pay for it: an unlikely occurrence, unless an NGO provides the services of a lawyer itself. At the appeals stage however, appellants have the right to a state-paid lawyer. NGOs say this aid is rarely forthcoming, and that asylum seekers who ask the guards are either ignored or simply forgotten.
matthew@maltamag.com