Malta has been calling for some sort of organised burden-sharing from its fellow EU member states for years, but, to date, very few have offered a helping hand and the majority have, instead, turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to Malta’s plight.

True, the influx of asylum seekers to Malta, and indeed to Italy, have plummeted this year despite predictions this spring by EU Commissioner Jacques Barrot and others that numbers would be pushed to new record levels, driven, in part, by the economic crisis to greener pastures in the EU.

That, clearly, did not happen. Having said that, no one is to know what might happen next year and in the years to come. Italy has been pushing migrant boats back to Libya, a grave humanitarian concern in this newspaper’s view. However, the new practice has, in part, diluted the numbers of migrants eventually reaching Italian and Maltese shores.

If the Malta-Italy route becomes out of bounds, human traffickers, inventive as they are, will undoubtedly seek new routes for their human cargo, who pay a high price for crossing from Africa to Europe. That price, sadly, is often their lives.

The shift has already been seen this year, with Greece having received record numbers of asylum seekers. Next year it could be Spain and Cyprus, or indeed any other EU country on the bloc’s borders with the rest of the world.

If they help by signing up for the pilot burden-sharing project for Malta, on a voluntary basis, they could be helping themselves in the years to come if the mechanism needs to be extended to them in the future.

This, however, has not yet been the case, despite the ethos of European solidarity. In joining the bloc, a country is requested to surrender a part of its sovereignty and in return enjoy the solidarity, and the burden-sharing that comes with that solidarity, of the rest of the members.

Tomorrow Malta will urge its fellow EU member states to sign on to the pilot burden sharing project, through which Malta expects to resettle some 2,000 of its resident migrants with legal status.

In reality, the request is not such a tall order. Breaking the figures down with simple arithmetic, it works out to a mere 77 refugees for each of the other 26 member states.

But, somewhat unbelievably, a reputable Dutch news wire report yesterday claimed that lobbying by Commissioner Barrot among member states has so far been met with a cold reception by the majority of countries.

It is not as though Malta’s fellow EU members have not heard of Malta’s plight. The issue has come up time and time again at council sessions and in European parliamentary debates. It might, however, have more to do with the political repercussions of a government agreeing to take migrants off the hands of another member state.

Last year’s record arrivals of asylum seekers leapfrogged Malta into a global first place in terms of per capita asylum applications lodged in 2008, according to the UNHCR. Last year’s rise in applications was a staggering 89 per cent, compared with a 20 per cent increase across the whole of southern Europe and a six per cent rise in the EU as a whole.

Such a finding would clearly be a cause for concern for any EU member state, and would lead it to clamour, as Malta has done, for support.

But the fact that the United States has done more to help Malta address the migrant situation, at least in terms of head counts, than the whole of the EU put together simply defies belief.

Back to the previous point on Italy’s forced returns. Those asylum seekers have a legitimate legal and humanitarian right to apply for asylum, which cannot be done in Libya. The returns should be condemned more than they have been. Sending people back to a country such as Libya that has no human rights to speak of and denying them the right to apply for asylum is nothing short of criminal.

The Italian request that the establishment of an asylum frontline office in a North African state be discussed at October’s meeting of EU leaders is positive. Malta had, in fact, first tabled the proposal and had suggested Libya, where the vast majority of Malta’s and Italy’s migrants begin their Mediterranean crossings.

If such an office, to be run by the UNHCR, which has already committed with Malta to do so, were to be realised, Malta could put to rest the vast majority of its concerns over the migratory phenomenon, while at the same time untold hundreds or even thousands of lives the sea claims each year could also be saved.

The concept would see the UNHCR assessing migrants’ asylum claims at the country of departure, after which those qualifying for one form of humanitarian protection status or another would be placed within the United Nations body’s quota system.

Migrants that would otherwise have found themselves at the mercy of the Italian or Maltese governments would be no longer be necessarily hosted by Malta or Italy, but rather by the EU at large –as is the case with the way the EU accepts refugees from other troubled parts of the world.

Failed asylum seekers, meanwhile, could potentially be transported back to their countries of origin straight from Libya.

Such a move would provide Malta with the sort of automatic burden sharing from its fellow EU member states it has so long been fighting for at both European Parliament and Council level.

Up to now, burden sharing has been taking place, but on an informal and unorganised manner, with Malta’s successful asylum seekers being given travel documents once they receive humanitarian protection status, with which they simply move on to Europe and never look back, unless, of course they are found by the authorities to be in a country they should not be in and are sent back to Malta. That happens, but it would appear to be more the exception rather than the rule.

It would be much better to formalise a properly functioning burden sharing mechanism that is fair and equitable, with which all member states can work – and in the process keep tabs on the actual numbers of migrants each state is hosting, which at the moment is unquantifiable in countries larger than Malta.

Real burden sharing is not only in Malta’s interest, it is in the entire EU’s interest.