I am very glad that a delegation from the European Parliament will be visiting Malta this week in order to investigate the conditions in which immigrants are detained here. I find it rather odd however that they chose to assess our detention system now when it is known to all that the situation is, at this time of the year, far from chaotic. A visit immediately after summer would raise eyebrows higher. Usually conditions at detention centres tend to deteriorate rapidly in summer when the immigration season is in full swing. The EP delegation would have been able to make a better assessment at that time of the year.

It is a well-known fact that my views on detention policy are very similar to those of my counterpart. So, you may be asking, why provoke the EP delegation to have a snapshot of the situation at detention centres at a time when circumstances are worse?

It is no secret that detention policy is full of flaws. But that will not change my views on detention. I have been to detention centres myself and I am on record in criticising the authorities harshly over what I saw. But that was two years ago. Today, I ask myself: what would the situation be today in open centres had detention policy been discarded?

Most probably, we would have an EP delegation visiting Malta more regularly to assess the appalling conditions prevailing at open centres, to where the crises would automatically shift. Immigrants, whether genuine refugees or not, would require a roof, a bed, a wardrobe, a job or at least an allowance or relief from our social security. Providing all this would be as difficult as providing shelter in closed centres today. And those who profess that no immigrant would be obliged to live inside open centres in a detention-free scenario would have to explain in detail how immigrants will manage to provide for themselves the basic requirements to live decently. Or are the authorities expected to build more open centres proportionate in number to the extent of immigration flows that would doubtlessly increase?

A visit by an EP delegation sometime in October would give it a clearer picture of how the situation would be in open centres without detention policy. Critics would argue that immigrants would not be around in open centres at daytime so conditions won't be that bad. Then we'll have to see how the situation would be at bedtime when presumably all immigrants would return in droves to the open centres to eat and sleep.

Of course most of them won’t return at all, particularly those who know they do not qualify for protection under the Geneva Convention and who, most probably, would be in the irregular employ and very happily exploited. To some, that may be a solution to the problem. But instead I see longer term social repercussions.

To me, it is obvious that the EP delegation will be critical of detention centres and detention policy. But if it had to return to Brussels with doing just that it would be making a great disservice to the cause of immigration and asylum. During its visit, the EP delegation would do well to monitor to what extent, if at all, the European Union has assisted Malta financially and materially in dealing with unsustainable and uncontrolled immigration flows during the last couple of years.

It would do well to determine whether the European Commission is today in a position to be able to provide immediate and sufficient relief to the Maltese government in the event that the Island faces a sudden surge of immigration. So far, there is no pan-European mechanism in place.

It would be heartening if the European Union would establish clearer guidelines and policies regarding “responsibility sharing” between member states. It knows, I hope, that the current phenomenon of immigration is not just a Maltese problem or a mere “cause for concern” to the other European countries, as one prominent European leader recently told our Prime Minister, but a clear and present European problem.

I do hope that the EU will start sensitising itself on the fact that issuing directives forcing member-states (indeed frontier states) to shorten detention periods would make greater sense in a scenario where all member-states, and not just receiving states, would carry the burden of providing for the care of refugees-in-waiting as well as of rejected immigrants with few hopes for repatriation.

In which case EU directives affecting detention periods would make more sense should they be applied concurrently with overdue amendments necessary to the Dublin Convention. To me, handling immigration flows would be far less problematic today if the general legal framework is applied holistically rather than piecemeal.

I look forward to learn from the EP delegation’s findings. I wish them a pleasant stay in our beautiful and hospitable country.

Dr Gulia is opposition spokesman for home affairs