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Matthew Vella
“I wouldn’t spend a minute there, nobody would,” communist MEP Giusto Catania tells journalists at the Phoenicia Hotel. The European Parliament’s delegation is almost three hours late for its press conference, held up because the appalling conditions they witnessed at Malta’s asylum camps demanded they visit all the compounds and witness for themselves the situation of around 2,000 immigrants held in detention.
Their visit has revealed serious human rights violations which the MEPs say will be reported back to Brussels. “It is certainly not a situation adequate for 2006,” delegation president Stefano Zappalà says, a statement that has become the norm for every delegation that has visited Malta’s detention centres until now.
But what emerges from the MEPs’ visit is a picture that has been unknown until now. They claim, forcefully, that NGOs and lawyers are “nowhere to be seen” inside the camps. “The asylum seekers told us this, everyone told this, that they never get to see NGO representatives and lawyers inside the camp,” French MEP Patrick Gaubert says.
The rest of the MEPs are appalled that asylum seekers are kept for as much as 18 months inside the camps. They say Malta is clearly acting against the law, but they want to see every European nation carry their responsibility, and to see the EU helping the island face the influx, and ensure repatriation of immigrants within six months.
Of even greater surprise is the admission by Catania that the government, whom he says painted a positive picture of the conditions at the detention camps they visited, had told them they could be accompanied by the press. “We were surprised you weren’t there,” Catania says, possibly unaware that government enforces a strict policy not to allow journalists access to the detention centres.
And just a day before the arrival of the delegation to Malta, journalists were given their first choreographed tour outside, not inside, the detention centres. “It seems the presence of MEPs has stimulated government into allowing journalists inside for the first time. We hope this will also stimulate a greater degree of transparency and openness about the detention system,” Catania says.
The MEPs are unequivocal about what they saw. Gaubert, who belongs to the European People’s Party, says the question on the faces of the detainees they saw was ‘what is our future here’? “The conditions are miserable. In one place, there were 15 men to a room, the corridors packed. There were people who had been there for over nine months, waterlogged washrooms; the toilets disgusting. We were told we couldn’t take photos so as to respect the immigrants’ privacy, but it was the immigrants themselves who beckoned us to take photos, to see the conditions in their rooms.”
And then Gaubert expresses his disgust at Malta’s asylum camps with one terse statement: “We’re invited to dinner tonight, but frankly I’ve lost my appetite.”
It is clear, Gaubert continues, that the Maltese are violating human rights provisions and also Directive 2003/9, which lays down minimum standards for the reception of asylum seekers. The directive had to be implemented by February 2005. “Journalists have to enter these centres, to witness for themselves what is going on.”
But the MEPs are also conscious of the problems Malta faces. Zappalà says he is aware Malta and its southern neighbours are in the frontline of the African influx and help from the European Commission has been lacking. The MEPs seem to agree on one thing: it is time for Europe to adopt a common immigration policy.
But yet many of them say there is little the European Parliament can do. Cypriot MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides says the problem is a democratic deficit in the EU. “It’s up to the political groups to get together and get the Commission to work on a common immigration policy. The only way is for political forces to join together.”
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
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