The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has just been to Malta, and it didn’t like what it saw. Malta’s growing army of apocalyptic thinkers, on the other hand, didn’t like what the working group said, and is busy jamming cyberspace with prejudice and hysteria.
The UN working group was here not just to inspect the detention camps for illegal immigrants, but to look at all the places where people are detained, including the Corradino Prison, the closed wards at Mount Carmel Hospital and the cells at the Police HQ lock-up. It has made pronouncements that are of significant importance to Maltese citizens, but they appear to have gone right over the heads of our home-grown version of the National Front.
It has voiced its concern about the long periods that people spend on remand at Corradino, which prompted the government to go on the defensive and say that it has nothing to do with remand, which is ordered by the magistrate or judge. That’s correct, but it is also true that the government is ultimately responsible for efficiency at the law courts and, despite repeated attempts to sort things out, there has been little in terms of improvement, except where court records and the introduction of information technology systems are concerned. The working group claimed that more than 50 per cent of those held in prison are on remand rather than serving a sentence. The government insists that the real figure is much less than that: of the 431 people in prison, 131 are awaiting trial.
Another important issue raised by the UN working group was that people detained by the police for questioning are not permitted assistance from a lawyer. This is an important matter about which I have written several times, pointing out that there have been judgements by the European Court of Human Rights on the right of a person to assistance from a lawyer when in police custody. All the suspicion surrounding the case of Nicholas Azzopardi, who died at the Police HQ, would have been avoided, had the government done its duty and obliged the police to introduce systems of taping interviews and not interviewing suspects without the presence of a lawyer. Tonio Borg, when he was Home Affairs minister, showed no inclination to get this done, which does not surprise me. One hopes that Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici will over-rule resistance from the police force and get this sorted out. “The absence of a lawyer during this crucial period is a significant blemish on the system,” the UN group said.
It also called on the government to introduce a parole system, and criticised the fact that Malta does not have one. The UN group obviously doesn’t know how things work in Malta: we use church and civil annulments to avoid introducing divorce, use other countries’ abortion clinics to avoid confronting the issue ourselves, and use presidential pardons to empty our prisons so that we don’t have to go to all the bother of having a proper, supervised parole system. The government has at least said, in response to this criticism, that it plans to publish soon its White Paper on Restorative Justice, which will propose a parole system.
That wasn’t all. The UN working group has shown its concern about “the high concentration of powers” given to the Ministry of Justice and Home Affairs, which is responsible for the police, the prisons, the detention camps, the Refugee’s Commission, the Prison Visitors Board and the Permanent Commission Against Corruption. It said that this sort of situation can lead to the perception of lack of transparency and of total control.
Malta’s Far-Right army of sofa commentators and coffee-shop thinkers ignored all this and instead homed in like vultures – but for entirely the wrong reasons – on what the UN group said about conditions in our detention camps. They aren’t called concentration camps, because of the inevitable association with World War II, yet concentration camps are precisely what they are. The UN group described the conditions at the Safi and Lyster Barracks camps as “appalling” and detrimental to the health of those confined there. The people living in tents at Hal Far, the group said, should not be left there even for one day, let alone for several months. The situation, it said, is not in line with international human rights law. Inside one of the camps, they found an eight-year-old boy, and a man debilitated by HIV and chicken-pox on top of that, who was isolated in a cell rather than being cared for in hospital. The government’s response to this was that the child had arrived “less than two weeks ago” (so that’s all right, then) and was released as soon as “he had obtained the required medical clearance”. That’s interesting. I looked after three eight-year-old boys myself at some point, and I don’t think any of them would have been capable of sorting out their medical clearance, or even of knowing they had to do so, should they have found themselves in a concentration camp in a foreign country, surrounded by bewildering hordes of strangers speaking different languages.
As for the man with HIV and chickenpox, the government responded that he “was not denied hospital treatment”. Ah, but was he offered it? Somehow, I don’t think he was given the chance to say “No, I don’t want to spend time in a nice, warm hospital bed being looked after by doctors and nurses, and would prefer to stay here in this freezing little room with no help and no proper care or treatment.”
The UN working group said that the conditions in the camps are so affecting the physical and mental health of the detainees that they are unable to understand their rights and follow up the legal process which will lead, for better or worse, to a change in their status. “People who have committed a crime have decent conditions of life in a prison cell at Corradino, but immigrants have to live in those conditions,” the group pointed out. Asylum applications are taking far too long to be processed, with some migrants still waiting even to be interviewed after six months in Malta. The so-called “fast track” system is not much better. It is intended for the most vulnerable people, but still it takes up to three months to release these individuals from detention centres.
The government’s reply was that it has to achieve a balance between security and humanitarian concerns, while taking into consideration the rights of asylum seekers. It said that efforts are continuously being made to improve conditions, but that last year the system had to cope with 2,775 new arrivals, compared to 1,702 the year before.
That’s all very well, but unfortunately the government undermines its own credibility when its front man on this issue is the right-wing Tonio Borg, with his occasional pronouncements that reveal his hostility to African immigrants. What was his latest one? Oh yes, that they are damaging our social fabric. I could be very scathing and point out that there’s not much “social fabric” here to damage, because for a population the size of a small town elsewhere we appear to have a disproportionate amount of violent crime, vicious murders, spouse-killing, child abuse, drug (or soap) trafficking, and the kind of social problems you’d only see in sink estates and the worst inner-city areas in Britain. But never mind, in the world view of people like Tonio Borg and the Ten Thousand Horsemen of the Apocalypse ranting all over timesofmalta.com, one foul Maltese citizen is worth a thousand decent, well-educated people from Africa – you know, just because he’s Maltese.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com