This week’s negotiations with the UNHCR may very well prove to be a rather large feather in the cap of the justice and home affairs minister. After weeks of prodding, a meeting with the UNHCR to discuss the serious shortcomings the government has been highlighting of late was granted – and all of Malta’s requests were met.

Not only did Malta secure crucial UNHCR endorsements on the EU’s pilot burden sharing project for Malta and on the concept of setting up a frontline asylum office in Libya, but the UNHCR also agreed to increase its currently depleted manpower in Malta to screen refugees to be resettled in the EU through the former initiative more quickly and effectively.

The real feather in the cap though was the agreement that would see Malta’s refugees fitting into the already established UNHCR quota system for resettling refugees across Europe. The unused quota, according to the agreement, would be filled by refugees being accommodated in Malta. The size of the unused quota varies from year to year but at times can easily stretch into four figures. And with some 6,000 migrants in Malta in open and closed centres and residing in the community, the initiative on its own could serve to drastically reduce the scale of Malta’s problem.

These initiatives, plus others in the pipeline hold the potential of reducing the proportions to much more manageable levels.

But all this begs the question of what would become of Malta’s right wing parties, which achieved a moderate swing in last month’s elections, if the migration problem were to, theoretically, dissipate? It seems that if the problem were to subside, they would be deprived of what is effectively their only platform – anti-immigration.

Future generations will look back at ours and judge us not on how we managed to keep migrants out of the country, but rather on how we dealt with the great humanitarian tragedy that is the migratory phenomenon.

Did we do what was right and responsible on the international stage, or did we simply close our doors and hearts and turn a blind eye to the plight of the countless desperate people suffering persecution and worse?