Too little, too late

The first action taken by Carmelo Abela, in his new capacity as minister for national security and home affairs, was to announce a review of detention policy following the shocking inquiry report into the death of Mamadou Kamara in 2012. 

Describing Malta’s detention policy as a ‘failure’, Abela said that he would be presenting ‘alternatives to detention’ in July, after meeting all the relevant stakeholders.

In itself this is hardly a revelation: all it means is that a process which had already begun under the previous administration – but which had been halted immediately after the March 2013 election – will now be resumed. Bearing in mind that this review had been sparked by at least one death as a result of shortcomings in Malta’s detention policy, it is little short of alarming that the government would act on the Kamara inquiry report’s findings only now: 18 months into its first term, and more than two years since the event itself.  

This delay reflects poorly on both Labour and Nationalist administrations, which – while otherwise always at each other’s throats – somehow always managed to reach consensus on what should really be the single most divisive and controversial government policy of them all: blanket and arbitrary detention for all irregular migrants for up to 18 months, in the absence of any judicial mechanism to challenge their detention. 

The Council of Europe (among other entities) has long warned that this inhumane and indiscriminate policy is an infringement of the human rights charter. Yet the Nationalist administration doggedly stuck to its guns over the past 15 years, and paradoxically always found the support of the Labour opposition. In fact, the only reason the Labour government has seemingly changed its tune on this subject was that this damning inquiry report has finally been made public: even if the timing of the publication strongly suggests that the government may have had an ulterior motive for releasing it only now. 

The inquiry’s conclusions are in fact deeply embarrassing for the former government, as they confirm that former minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici had in fact lost control of detention by 2012, with tragic consequences. The report revealed a shocking lack of discipline in detention camps, and pointed towards a central administrative failure to take seriously the responsibilities that come with such a critical policy.  

Publishing the report last week also provided the Labour party with a sorely needed excuse to turn the tables onto the Opposition, at a time when it was politically on the back foot. But now that the report has finally been published – even if for reasons which have nothing to do with detention reform – it is no longer an option for the government to simply carry on ignoring the same report’s recommendations, as it has in fact done ever since coming to power. 

In a sense, one can almost call this a thin silver lining on a dark and otherwise ominous cloud: by using this report as ammunition in a political tug-of-war, Muscat’s government has arguably forced itself to take cognisance of a problem it would otherwise have carried on ignoring indefinitely.

But this is cold comfort, when one recalls that it took the suspicious deaths of at least two detainees – Mamadou Kamara, and Infeanyi Nworkoye in 2011 – to finally force a policy rethink. That is too high a price to pay for the procrastination of two political parties in the face of a human rights crisis. 

Still, there is one significant aspect to Abela’s announcement on Monday: for the first time since this policy was introduced, we have a Cabinet minister conceding that detention has failed. The extent of this failure was made manifest not only by the aforementioned inquiry, but also by reports from human rights NGOs spanning well over a decade.

This week, the Jesuit Refugee Service provided further details of the grim reality that is life in detention centres. A JRS study indicates that the effects of detention include serious mental disorders among detainees – auditory hallucinations being the most commonly reported mental health syndrome, followed by mood disturbances, suicide ideations and insomnia – all exacerbated by the lack of adequate healthcare facilities at Mount Carmel Hospital. 

Ominously, almost 42% of patients sent to Mount Carmel had attempted suicide while in the detention centre. Of these, three people also attempted suicide repeatedly while in the asylum unit.

These and other problems have been widely reported by NGOs for over a decade. Even the sexual abuse of detainees, uncovered by the Kamara report, was not news to those who have access to the facilities themselves. In a joint statement, several NGOs said: “We are not shocked to read of sexual relations between a small number of Detention Services personnel and detained women. We are not shocked because we have been witnessing such incidents for several years.”

It was certainly not news to either Nationalist or Labour governments since at least 2012; yet it is only now – thanks to a report made public for all the wrong reasons – that these issues are finally getting any attention. 

This alone is a gross indictment of a political duopoly that seems to have forgotten the reasons for its own existence.