The forcible separation of families: that’s yet another human rights violation

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 11 July 2013, 09:27 Last update: about 11 years ago

There is no better litmus test as to a person’s true liberal outlook than getting them talking about the subject of African immigrants. That really gets things down to the bone.

Individuals who posture about civil liberties, thinking they are made up entirely of gay marriage, transgender marriage and divorce, but not of freedom of expression and certainly not of African immigrants running about town poisoning ‘our’ culture, suddenly become passionately engaged. Their facial expressions change, becoming closed and hostile. All the emotion they did not genuinely feel for transgender marriage, or gay marriage, or ‘taghna lkoll’ comes to the fore. It becomes impossible to change the subject.

It is immediately apparent that they have no true understanding of civil liberties, let alone of human rights. They have no understanding of the philosophy of thought that underpins them. They are single-issue thinkers: they want divorce because they want divorce, and because everyone else has it, and not because they have a grasp of the evolved thinking that leads one to the conclusion that non-availability of divorce legislation is wrong.

There are a lot of people like that about. There are some prominently vociferous ones, like the chairman of the Malta Council of Science and Technology, who thinks himself liberal because of his personal lifestyle choices, but who cannot tolerate being criticised, would like to see silenced those whose views he considers unacceptable, and can barely conceal his contempt of any suggestion that Turkey has a case for membership of the European Union and that African immigrants are only a problem because we have made them out to be one.

He thinks he speaks for the liberal majority, but the reality is that the majority are not liberal; voting for divorce legislation does not a liberal make. The majority here in Malta have all the liberal sentiments of rednecks at a hog-roast in some southern state of the USA, and for roughly the same reason: ignorance of certain things, lack of self-confidence and a general sense of insecurity.

It is in this context that the prime minister has felt so comfortable using the lives of human beings to try and pull off a brinkmanship stunt, only to be foiled at the 11th hour, as he spoke about it in parliament, when he was handed a ‘cease and desist’ order by the European Court of Human Rights. “We shall abide by the rule of law and obey this order,” he said. Nobody in parliament, at least not while I was listening, pointed out the inherent contradiction in his statement. Why obey a ‘cease and desist’ order from the very same court whose actual ruling – in a judgement last year – he had up till that very minute been ready to flout and defy?

It’s because the prime minister wanted an excuse to pull out without losing face, having realised what an almighty international and internal mess he had created. The ‘cease and desist’ order was not just the immigrants’ deus ex machina but his as well.

Before that, the prime minister had already displayed the true nature of his ‘government that listens’, his ‘caring government’. True liberals like myself, who understand that it is not all about sexual matters and civil unions, that those are side-issues where more complex freedoms are denied and fundamental rights violated, were shocked to hear him and his minister for national security talk clinically, calmly and callously about how “healthy males” were separated from the group of immigrants and selected for deportation. They talked as though this were a point in their favour: how sensitive they are; they weren’t planning on deporting the women and children.

There was absolutely no cognisance of the fact that this behaviour is actually much, much worse than sending everyone back, that it adds into the mix another gross violation of human rights: the forcible separation of families, of spouses from each other, of parents from their children. What sort of beast thinks it perfectly acceptable, a plus point even, to deport a man to an uncertain fate in Libya, while leaving his wife, perhaps even his child, locked up in Malta? They made a frightening and dangerous journey together, only to have Joseph Muscat and Manuel Mallia separate them forcibly and in a way that ensures they might never see each other again.

This behaviour, the coldness with which the prime minister and minister of national security talked about it, indicates that they do not even think of the immigrant group in terms of families, of people. And you do not even have to be a true liberal to be horrified at that; you just have to be a decent person.