The Prime Minister and the Minister of National Security gave a press conference the other day to tell us that they are prepared to defy the European Union they never wanted to join on the matter of migration via North Africa. With this gesture, they created a positive and enthusiastic impression among the bulk of our population, which appears – going by the comments on the Internet – to be made up of xenophobic rednecks prepared to join a Ku Klux Klan that would happily have set fire to them on the grounds that they are coloured.
I thought it most ironic. Here is the Prime Minister who sold himself to the electorate as Malta’s only true liberal, pandering to the fear of foreigners and hatred of blacks that can make Malta such a poisonous place. What price transgender marriage when just two weeks later you’re boasting that you will go to war with the European Union because Malta doesn’t want any more black people around? That is the essential argument. This is not about illegal immigration. This is about not wanting black people in Maltese society. Pretending that it is about numbers, when there are so many thousands of holders of diverse EU passports here, or that it is about illegality, just doesn’t wash. The true sentiments of those who object so passionately are revealed in the way they speak and comment online.
The Prime Minister has said twice already that he will use Malta’s veto in the European Union to create obstacles until he gets what ‘Malta’ wants. This is a form of ‘hostage-taking’ diplomacy that Mintoff deployed to make us a despised pariah state – an enemy with a chip on its shoulder rather than a colleague cooperating at the same table. Time has moved on, but the Labour Party has not. It still thinks in these frightful terms.
During a visit to the Malta Financial Services Authority, of all places, the Prime Minister told the press something much worse: that Malta will adopt a pushback policy “if necessary”. Pushback means sending human beings right back to the very place from which they have escaped. It is a violation of human rights. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled about this already, but the judgment, in February last year, seems to have passed the liberal Labour Party by unnoticed. Should the national security minister wish to look it up – he is, after all, a lawyer, though he is more familiar with the defence of cocaine traffickers than he is with the defence of human rights – the reference is Hirsi Jamaa and Others v Italy (application no. 27765/09).
The applicants are 11 Somalis and 13 Eritreans. They were in a group of 200 who left Libya in 2009 on three boats bound for Italy. When they were 35 miles south of Lampedusa, and in Malta’s search-and-rescue area, they were intercepted by the Italian Coastguard, forced aboard and taken directly to Tripoli. During the 10 hours they spent aboard the Italian military vessels, they were not told where they were being taken, and they were not asked for their papers. The Italian Prime Minister – a certain Silvio Berlusconi – then gave a press conference to say that what they did was “in accordance with the bilateral agreements with Libya that had come into force that year, marking an important turning-point in the fight against illegal immigration”.
The simple point here is that no European state can take unilateral action to violate the European Convention on Human Rights, nor does any bilateral agreement it signs carry more weight than its obligations under that Convention. Human rights are inalienable. Silvio Berlusconi’s bilateral agreement with Muammar Gaddafi (so, all right – it was technically Italy and Libya) to violate human rights does not have higher legal standing than the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court found that the applicants fell within the jurisdiction of Italy for the purposes of Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It found that there had been two violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment) because the applicants had been exposed to the risk of ill treatment in Libya, and of repatriation to Somalia or Eritrea. There had also been a violation of Article 4 of Protocol No. 4, which prohibits collective expulsions. And there had also been a violation of Article 13 (the right to an effective remedy) taken in conjunction with Article 3 and Article 4 of Protocol No. 4.
Our Prime Minister shows scant understanding of the complicated issues involved. He boils them down using the simplistic island mentality of somebody who spent five years fighting a war to keep Malta out of the European Union so that ‘nobody will tell us what to do’. His reasoning is quite unsound. Just as Malta “showed solidarity on the Greek bailout, forking out a sum of money to the tune of three per cent of its GDP, so it expects solidarity on this matter”, he said to the press. The two matters are entirely unrelated. His argument is illogical and worse than that, it demonstrates the spirit of somebody who has never mentally left the village. You hear arguments like that in village bars, but Muscat has no excuse.
His anti-EU sentiment, which he has kept carefully hidden while leading the Labour Party, is now coming to the fore. Does he think Malta will be sidelined by Europe because of its actions, he was asked? “We have been sidelined already,” he replied. And when EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, who is Swedish, more or less told him to stop making such a fuss because it’s not as though there are that many migrants, and he should keep things in perspective, Joseph Muscat shot back with one of the spiteful diversionary retorts that have become noted as his hallmark technique: “If that’s what you think, then we can always pass our immigrants on to Sweden.”
That kind of bitchy and out of point remark might play well in television debates, but it goes down like a lead balloon in international forums.
The European Court of Human Rights has found that the pushback of migrants is a violation of their fundamental right not to be exposed to torture and a threat to their life. Our Prime Minister and his collection of liberal rednecks think it is just fine to do that, as long as these islands don’t have to be exposed to the sight of black people who might ‘take over’.
And because the only thing the Labour Party and many Maltese seem to understand is penny-pinching while splashing out on rubbish, this argument might hit home where exposing people to torture does not. Italy was condemned to pay each one of those 24 immigrants €15,000. The damages are likely to be increased substantially in a repeat case, which is tantamount to ignoring the ruling of the ECHR. Italy has not pushed back any immigrants since. Meanwhile, Malta openly defies both its colleagues in the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights itself.
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