In a statement issued yesterday week Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg said the 220 were deported because they had no right to remain in Malta. Most of them never even asked to be considered as refugees.
Some days previously Amnesty International had claimed that some of the deportees had been tortured on arrival in Eritrea.
Dr Borg said UNHCR had been informed in 2002 that people were going to be repatriated to Eritrea and the UNHCR had not objected or complained. Nor was the government informed in 2002 that the return of the deportees could be of any danger to them.
But in documents tabled in the House of Representatives last Monday by Labour MP Joe Abela there is evidence that the government had indeed been warned, at least indirectly. The call for caution, however, came in a document around six months after the deportation had taken place.
On 8 July 2002 the group Eritreans for Human and Democratic Rights – UK wrote to the Prime Minister and two ministers, including Dr Borg. It said “the current human rights situation in Eritrea is very poor at the moment”.It quoted the European Parliament, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other agencies as having expressed their concern on the deteriorating human rights situation in Eritrea. The organisation claimed the actions being taken by the Maltese government against Eritrean refugees as “inappropriate and against the 1951 Refugee Convention resolution”.
On 11 July, lawyers George Abela and Lydia Zerafa appealed against the Refugee Commissioner’s decision of 27 June, regarding two Eritreans, Amanuel Yonas and his wife Habte Tsighe. They claimed the Refugee Commissioner had wrongly applied and wrongly interpreted the law. The two clients were members of the Eritrean Liberation Front.
The lawyers quoted from a European Parliament resolution on Eritrea of 7 February 2002 which said the country was being ruled with an iron fist, “allowing no opposition” and a US Department of State report on human rights practices in Eritrea which was completely opposite to the Refugee Commissioner’s claim that the situation in Eritrea had stabilised.
The Refugee Commissioner’s (Charles Buttigieg) recommendation, the lawyers said, was “in violation of the human rights provisions”.
The appeal was, however turned down by the Refugee Appeals Board in a one sentence communication on 27 August.The deportation was carried out at the beginning of October 2002.
On 12 March 2003, a note verbale was received by UNHCR from Malta with a set of 11 questions on the situation in Eritrea submitted by the Attorney General.
In its reply, on 26 March, UNHCR said that reports of various human rights monitoring bodies “depict a rather deteriorating trend, particularly since September 2001… By all accounts, Eritrea’s Human Rights record remains, in a number of fields, quite poor. Human rights violations continue to be reported inter alia with regard to the treatment of opposition political groups and movements, freedom of expression, arbitrary detention and detention conditions, including reports of torture, ill-treatment and forced labour, treatment of draft evaders/deserters, discrimination against persons of Ethiopian origin and in the context of sexual and gender based violence.”
It is true that as from 21 December 2002 UNHCR applied what are called the “cessation clauses” of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to Eritrea but, UNHCR added, the application of the cessation clauses is limited in scope and should not apply to individual refugees who have valid grounds for claiming a well-founded fear of persecution or who can invoke compelling reasons arising out of previous persecution.
UNHCR cannot express itself regarding all categories of Eritreans returning home: it only monitors the return of former refugees in the context of organised voluntary repatriation programmes.