Frankly speaking, this newspaper and large swathes of the country had expected far better from our progressive and European Prime Minister when he reacted to the 290 migrants who were rescued by the armed forces and brought ashore to Malta earlier this week.

Speaking even more frankly, the incident in all its facets – the phone call to EU Council president Hermann Van Rompuy the same morning, the threat to use Malta’s veto power at EU Council level to force burden sharing and the even more ominous threat to begin pushing back asylum seekers to Libyan shores – is abhorrent and has shamed the country on the international stage.

Most of the international press carried the Prime Minister’s reaction and on reading those reports, those of us with a modicum of humanity and national pride blushed not red, but purple.

Such comportment by the Prime Minister of this country, the diplomatic equivalent of a child stamping his feet and throwing a tantrum, is completely unbecoming and unwarranted. And this, in actual fact, was the first real litmus test of this administration on the irregular migration front.

And, for the record, ‘irregular migration’ is the legally correct term, not ‘illegal immigration’ as the Prime Minister is terming it. That is because anyone who comes without papers through irregular channels and seeks asylum has an international legal right to do so. As such, anyone who seeks asylum, as this week’s group are sure to do, has every legal right to do so.

Firstly, the threat of pushbacks. In an interview with this newspaper the week before the last general election, then Opposition leader Joseph Muscat had confirmed that he would be in favour of pushbacks of irregular migrants to Libya, but clarified that no such policy would be considered until Libya is declared a safe country in terms of international rules, and becomes a signatory of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Neither of these two criteria has come to pass, nor will they for some time now.

That suggestion was made even though the Prime Minister’s own information was that two of those migrants, who were airlifted ashore for urgent medical treatment, had been shot while escaping from detention in Libya. The very thought of threatening to push would-be asylum seekers back to a country where they stand the chance of being shot for attempting to escape detention is nothing short of abominable.

It is true that the previous administration had turned a blind eye towards, and had perhaps even quietly welcomed, the pushbacks to Libya that Italy was once practising, but even at the worst of times, at the height of the migrant tide, that government had never even dared to suggest doing so. 

This editorialist had covered the migration situation, in depth, since it began back in 2005, and while the previous government can certainly be blamed for the abysmal conditions in which it kept migrants in detention, when it addressed the situation, in public and private alike, it always stressed the humanitarian side of the equation. The Prime Minister did make a fleeting reference to the country’s humanitarian obligations, but it was a token reference and the comments and actions that followed greatly overshadowed it.

The pushback practice as practises by Italy and as threatened now by Malta is, according to the European Court of Human Rights, illegal. According to human rights groups, it is abhorrent.

The issue was always that, under international law, countries that have effective control, authority, or power over third country nationals intercepted at sea has certain responsibilities. These include ensuring access to a satisfactory asylum determination procedure; and to not return anyone, directly or indirectly, to a country where they would be at real risk of persecution or serious harm.

These rights were never afforded in Gaddafi’s Libya, which had an extremely dubious human rights record and was never a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Matters, by all reports, have not changed in the new Libya.

Even by threatening the practice, Malta loses any stake it has claimed on any sort of moral high ground on the issue of the migration phenomenon, and its arguments for burden sharing will be frowned upon more than usual by its European counterparts.

It is unquestionable that the EU has failed to assist Malta with burden sharing, even in the country’s most dire time of need, and that it is still failing to do so. The Unites States, in fact, has helped Malta far more than Malta’s 26 fellow EU countries have combined. That in itself is shameful.

But the fact of the matter is that one cannot, at least for the time being, claim that the arrival of 290 migrants this week and a total of 600 so far this year is a national crisis that warrants immediate EU action. There may come a time when it is, but that time is certainly not now.

The kind of rhetoric the Prime Minister is spewing on the subject is doing the country no favours whatsoever. It may go down well with certain small segments of the population but the vast majority of this country has its moral compass well-calibrated. The Prime Minister needs to change his tone on the issue or, in the long run, the country and his party may very well suffer the respective diplomatic and political repercussions.