With the world’s eyes currently focussed on Valletta in eager anticipation of some form of concrete action to address the decade-old humanitarian crisis of African refugees risking life and limb - far too often unsuccessfully - to reach the safety of Europe, Malta can expect plaudits by the week’s end for having had the gumption to host the first meeting of its kind.

And the conclusions of this week’s EU-Africa migration summit - irrespective of their actual worth, significance or humanitarian credentials – will undoubtedly be packaged as a major victory for Europe and Africa alike.

The summit will emerge with a ‘Valletta communiqué’ and the meeting will go down in history as a great achievement by the host country – Malta.  But as Malta basks in the inevitable praise, it would also do well to do some national soul searching in the area.

The government has clearly turned a new leaf in its approach to irregular migration since the ‘push-back’ days of summer 2013 and has opted for a far more humanitarian approach to the crisis in the wake of several migrant tragedies in its backyard.  But it is still falling short in so many respects.

For starters, Malta’s automatic detention policy for anyone entering the country irregularly is still a shameful practice which persists in the face of unrelenting criticism from practically every leading human rights organisations in the world. 

It is appreciated that the policy serves as a deterrent to dissuade asylum seekers from seeking Maltese shores, but, then again, Malta’s well-known small size and lack or job opportunities already serve the country very well as a deterrent.  Alternatives have been offered by the UNHCR and others, options that many are hopeful the government will take on board.

Secondly, under the current government’s watch, thousands of Libyans and Algerians, most of whom can only be described as economic migrants, have illegally been granted Maltese residency permits and Schengen visas – meaning that the well-heeled in North Africa have been allowed, through the government’s institutional failures, to illicitly purchase entry into the EU, entry which the world’s downtrodden huddled masses are being denied.

Thirdly, and worst of all, the country sells citizenship to the world’s rich, people who in this case are the ultimate economic migrants, while it denies recognition the world’s stateless who have found themselves on Maltese soil.

There is something intrinsically incongruous when you have a government that does not bat an eyelid at criticism over its programme of selling citizenships to the wealthy on the one hand, and denying the underprivileged the means with which to address their statelessness.

Malta – along with just Cyprus, Estonia and Poland - have not signed the United Nations’ 1954 convention on statelessness, a key instrument in the protection of fundamental human rights of stateless persons.

The reason being, according to the government, is that if it were to do so, Malta’s human resources in the area would be strained and the system would become clogged up with so many more irregular migrants claiming they are stateless.

But certainly countries that receive more than their fair share of irregular migrants such as Greece, Italy and Spain as well as the remaining 21 EU member states have robust determination procedures in place to ensure that processing and protecting stateless people does not clog up the system.

If it is just a question of funding, perhaps Malta could take some of the funds accrued from the sale of passports to the wealthy, and redirect a portion of those funds into beefing up the human resources and procedures required of modern, humanitarian states.

The fact that there are children being born stateless in Malta is entirely unacceptable in this day and age, as highlighted by both the Council of Europe and the United Nations.  Both expressed concern that over cases of children of irregular migrants who are not provided with birth registration and urged Malta to “ensure that all children born in its territory are registered at birth, regardless of the status of their parents, with particular attention to children in single-parent families and/or irregular migration situations”.

It also called on Malta to “ensure that a child born in Malta to parents who are foreigners, but unable to pass on their nationality, or to parents who themselves are stateless or whose nationality is unknown, is granted citizenship.”

The country simply cannot allow this situation to persist, it is a country’s intrinsic duty to ensure that children born on its soil do not suffer the silent burden of statelessness.  Malta missed a golden opportunity to do just that that when it amended the Citizenship Act to cater for its citizenship programme for the wealthy, while continuing to ignore the silent plight of the stateless among us.

The Citizenship Act direly needs another revision if Malta is to practice what it preaches.