Prime Minister Joseph Muscat today addressed the 3rd Global Shared Societies Forum held at the Nizami Ganjavi International Centre in Azerbaijan in the presence of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan's president.
In his speech, Dr Muscat said that the United States and Australia have their own ways of managing the phenomenon of migration when faced mostly with economic migrants.
“Europe is in a rut, torn between rescuing people and security concerns.
“That is why there is the need for new rules not only at European but also at global level.
The world order changed fast to save banks. It should change faster for human beings.”
The following is Dr Muscat’s full speech
Rules are there in order to ascertain frameworks, promote predictability and are most of the time seen as the best way of doing things.
Whether its politics or sport, rules help determine a universally accepted result and give legitimacy to such results.
But rules are not impermeable to the test of time. People change. Perspectives change. Priorities change.
Take maybe the simplest example, that of what is arguably the single most popular sport in the world. Football is pretty straightforward. The team which scores most goals wins. Nevertheless, even in my lifetime I have observed some drastic changes to the rules and the context.
Winning teams used to get awarded two points, now they get three. Keepers could handle back passes with their hands and keep the ball for as long as they wanted, now they cannot. There used to be one referee and two linesmen, all dressed in Ford T-Model black, now there are one referee and five assistants plus substitutes, all in fancy colour.
Why all these and many other changes to a rather simple game? Namely because the context rapidly changed from followers happy to hear a radio commentary once or twice a week and then patiently watching highlights later on in the day, to one where viewers want immediacy and ideally plenty of goals.
The body governing a sport realised these changes. Nevertheless, it seems that countries and politicians take more time to grasp the fact that the world is changing and that change will become even more of essence as time goes by.
Small size rarely comes with advantages. Nevertheless, most of the time it makes you take challenges, even the simplest, more seriously than bigger, stronger counterparts. This is true of Malta, the smallest member state of the European Union. Our size has over time made us more resilient, nimble, flexible and agile than most of our competitors.
How else could one explain the fact that we have managed to achieve some of the largest rates of economic growth, increase in employment and lowest unemployment rates.
Thus, when we speak of change and innovation, we are referring to a process to which we are used as a country, and to which we owe our own success.
Over the decades, we made our contributions to the international debate with ideas that helped shaped debates.
At United Nations level, we put forward the idea of our sea-beds being a common heritage of mankind, and were the first country more than quarter of a century ago to identify climate change as a new major challenge to the global community. Only some months ago we dared promote the concept of citizenship outside its conventional form by promoting alternative mainstream routes.
Today, I would like to use this platform to give impetus to another major debate which is hitting home with so many millions of people worldwide.
That debate is on migration.
Last week I attended an inter-faith ceremony during which we laid to rest 24 unidentified bodies which our Armed Forces, together with the Italian navy, recovered from the sea following the most recent shipwreck in the Mediterranean. Around 900 persons are thought to have died in just this one single tragic event. Only 28 persons survived.
Yes, there is a need to go after the criminal network which is making millions out of this modern day equivalent of slave trade. Yes, we need to help stabilise those countries whose territories and porous borders are providing fertile grounds for traffickers.
But the reality is that the migratory trends and proportions in the age of the social media are unprecedented and have been so for quite some time.
The global community is treating this challenge as though it is the same as that which we experienced during the past century. We are tackling an evolved phenomenon with outdated rules that might still be legal but have become anachronistic or plain irrelevant.
There is an obvious need for the global community to come to terms with this new reality that will continue morphing. Yes, the long term solutions are peace, stability and economic development. But then again, in the long term we are all dead.
The current migrant tragedy in the Mediterranean and elsewhere is a man-made event, and needs immediate action. The current rules at addressing it are, as we said, inadequate.
Europe will take action against traffickers but the problem will persist until there is war and instability. This is not to mention the economic migrants that do not benefit from protection but have the human aspiration to improve their standard of living.
Isn't it obvious that people will flee from wars? The dead in the latest tragedy reminded me of the now iconic picture of a man jumping from the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. He made a choice that he would probably have a better possibility at surviving by jumping from that unmentionable height, than he had by staying in the unbearable heat that developed from the explosions.
Many of these migrants face the same choice. They would rather take a slim chance by boarding a rickety boat rather than staying in a country where they see no future.
The United States and Australia have their own ways of managing this phenomenon when faced mostly with economic migrants. Europe is in a rut, torn between rescuing people and security concerns.
That is why there is the need for new rules not only at European but also at global level.
The world order changed fast to save banks. It should change faster for human beings.