The very next day after the Pope visited Lampedusa, the Maltese government threatened to send Air Malta planes to take back to Tripoli 102 Somali and Eritrean migrants who had arrived in Malta the previous night.

As is known, many NGO volunteers immediately appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and to the European Commission to stop the push-backs. Like what has happened before in Pozzallo and Porto Empedocle in Sicily, these associations had not been allowed to meet the migrants to inform them of their rights to ask asylum.

Later on that same day, the Maltese government was forced to cancel the two planned flights following a preliminary ruling from the Strasbourg court, possibly based on the same principles that had led to the condemnation of the Italian government on the Hirsi case on 12 February 2012. This case of collective pushbacks is forbidden by Article 4 of the fourth Protocol annexed to the European Convention in defence of Human Rights and by Article 19 of the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights of the EU, rules that had already been infringed by the Italian authorities with the collective pushbacks of Egyptians from Syracuse and of Afghans, Kurds, Pakistani and Iraqis from Ancona and Venice towards Greece and to Turkey.

The Maltese government complained that in the week before the Pope’s visit to Lampedusa that more than 400 asylum seekers had arrived in Malta and that this is a proportionately high number considering that the Maltese population amounts to 450,000. It is as if in the same period 40,000 persons arrived in Italy. The Maltese government also complained that its repeated appeals to EU member states to share the burden had not been accepted. However, the Maltese government unfortunately went into a reactionary mode that stated that all options were open and that it was considering using the veto in EU matters if the EU did not change its policy with regards to immigration with special reference to Malta.

Readers will surely remember the reaction of Cecilia Malmstrom and the official reaction on 9 July by the European Commission threatening sanctions. All EU officials stated that the EU stood ready to increase support to Malta.

But in the week that preceded the Pope’s arrival in Lampedusa other things happened and the victims have now been completely forgotten.

In the past months, Italy gave Libya some patrol boats with the pious explanation these were meant to save human lives but actually to reinforce the Libyan frontier police under a mixed command, as re-stated at the last Italo-Libyan summit held in Rome on 4 July, to save human lives but also to impede the boats full of asylum seekers from leaving Libyan waters and reaching Lampedusa or other places.

According to the Libya Herald of 9 July, the Libyan patrol boats had met, the previous day, a boat full of migrants with its engine conked out, still in Libyan waters, with on board a child that had just been born. Three migrants died during the intervention by the Libyan patrol boats in mysterious circumstances. The survivors, 103 migrants included 15 women and three minors coming from Somalia, according to the spokesman for the Libyan coast guards, Ayob Amar Ghassen speaking to the Libya Herald. One of the survivors was taken to hospital but the rest were handed over to the Department against illegal immigration and kept in custody. In fact, these Somali migrants who survived were taken, even women and children, to one of the detention centres in Libya where, even today, abuse of all kinds takes place.

Soon too, one expects hundreds of asylum seekers to be forced back to Libya from the Shousha camp, on the border with Tunisia where hundreds have been held for the past two years, since there seems no possibility of Tunisia taking them or of their being accepted in the EU countries. These persons should have been given protection; instead they are being forced into the hands of people traffickers or condemned to die at sea.

Both Italy and Malta have long signed bilateral agreements both with Tunisia and Libya to stop those who would likely ask for asylum status with the specious argument that this saves lives and undermines the criminal gangs that gain through the boat people’s plight. Italy, for example, during the afore-mentioned 4 July summit in Rome confirmed the agreements signed with Libya even if Libya has never signed the Geneva Convention and does not give any protection to those asking for asylum nor to those accepted by UNHCR as meriting protection. According to UNHCR some 40 migrants died trying to escape from Libyan detention centres and others have died without any trace of them. And according to the Libyan coast guards, hundreds of migrants have been ‘saved’ these past weeks to end up in detention centres that are worse than anything under Gaddafi.

These deaths, to use the Pope’s words, are also our responsibility, like those who were found dead in the sea near Lampedusa and who are now buried anonymously in the cemetery of that island. The responsibility for these deaths is not spread evenly: some are more responsible than others. There is also responsibility not just for the dead but also for those still alive and massed together in the Libyan detention centres, exposed to all kinds of abuse.

Those who really treasure human rights, both in Malta and in Italy, should never permit that bilateral agreements that aim to block departures from North Africa be described as ‘saving human lives’ or ‘blocking illegal immigration’. If anything, such playing around with words undermines the courageous action of the armed forces of the two countries which often, at great danger to the servicemen, save many human lives.