MEP joins chorus of support for Turkish mothers jailed over false IDs

Nationalist MEP Robert Metsola and Moviment Graffitti have added their voice to a chorus of support for two Turkish teachers who have been separated from their young children, after being jailed for the use of false documents to leave the island.

The two-hour stopover in Malta turned into a six-month nightmare for Rabia Yavuz and Muzekka Deneri, who were carrying fake European Union identity cards to travel to Belgium and renew documentation after allegedly fleeing arrest in Turkey on suspicion of having taken part in a failed coup.

Also arrested were two Syrian – not their husbands – who were also jailed for six months on charges of forgeyr and using falsified identification documents. The women were also jailed, and forcibly separated from their distraught 2 and 4-year-old children, whose screams could be heard as the two women were taken away.

Legal aid lawyer Christopher Chircop told MaltaToday the two women are conneced to the Gulen movement involved in the 2016 failed coup d’etat against Recep Tayyep Erdogan. Fleeing to Greece to escpae the post-copu purges, they had to renew documents that were about to expire in Brussels, a flight which involved a two-hour stopover in Malta.

Chircop says he informed police inspector Karl Roberts of this, but the police insisted on prison in court proceedings after the women pleaded guilty. A care order over the children would have been triggered while in the care of the Appoġġ social welfare agency.

Nationalist MEP and European Parliament vice-president Robert Metsola has expressed her horror over the arrests, saying the children were unable to speak Maltese or English: “A system that jails mothers for half a year and takes away their children for using a fake ID card, while using kids’ gloves against career criminals, shadow bankers, dodgy architects, corrupt politicians, revenge pornographers, organised crime and money launderers, is a system that is broken.”

Metsola railed against what she called a “shattered system that is weak with the strong and strong with the weak.”

“It throws the book at foreign mothers using fake ID cards, terrorises youths caught with a half-a-joint, threatens journalists seeking the truth. It forces teenagers to grow up under the spectre of a jail sentence as they wait 12 years for a judgement. It leaves parents waiting years to see their children as cases drag on and on. It’s a system that needs to be rebuilt.”

Moviment Graffiti has called recent judgments on migration as “forms of institutionalised racism” after courts were dishing out six-month prison sentences to mainly foreign migrants attempting to leave the island with false documents.

Graffiti said that although the Malta Immigration Act does provide for a six month to two-year sentenced for such acts, community-based sanctions were permissible under the Probation Act.  “This discriminatory use of sentencing towards migrants and asylum seekers demonstrates that the criminal courts are being deliberately over punitive towards the most vulnerable. “ 

They added “cruel” prison sentences are contributing to the current overpopulation crisis in the prison system. 

“While organised crime and human trafficking are not to be ignored, there is a dire need for a more humane approach in dealing with immigration offences, so that the vulnerable are not criminalised and enmeshed in criminal justice processes. 

“This is definitely not the scope of the criminal justice system which is supposed to provide a fair and just treatment to all as well as to ensure that the severity of the punishment is proportionate to the offence committed.”