Have you ever wondered what being sucked into the gaping maw of a broken system would feel like?
I’m not talking about anything pedestrian like navigating a bureaucratic maze to appeal a parking fine.
I’m talking about being lied to at every stage of a journey that often spans thousands of kilometres.
Having your very identity questioned, quarantined, seized.
Being forced to live in metal containers and shabby tents.
Imagine trying to survive a legal regime that is designed to break you.
Picture yourself in handcuffs, getting roughly shifted from one obscure hellhole to the other, all against your will.
Think of what it would be like to indefinitely rot away in a detention centre, only to then be told that you’re going to be sent elsewhere. Anywhere but here.
Or, if you’re feeling lucky, try to conceive what you’d feel if you were one of the few who make it through this soul crushing process, only to then be left in limbo by the authorities, never knowing whether the hammer is about to come down on you or whether this mean little island is going to accept your existence.
These are real people’s experiences in a regime that is more about punishment than it is about protection. And it’s been happening on our soil for over a decade.
On Wednesday, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) published the 2024 edition of the Asylum Information Database report (AIDA). Malta’s country report is compiled by aditus foundation, an NGO focused on human rights advocacy work.
Their findings aren’t just alarming because of the litany of human rights violations that they highlight.
It’s the fact that the government routinely brushes off the extremely severe abuses that occur on its watch that makes for haunting reading.
During the COVID pandemic in particular, the government was detaining all asylum seekers arriving on our shores, citing a need for quarantine as pretext for arbitrary detention.
Last year, “Malta reverted to automatically detaining all new arrivals for an almost mandatory minimum of two months, with the exception of visibly vulnerable persons,” Malta’s country report reads.
The government’s brutal migration policies, which largely focus on stopping potential asylum seekers from even setting foot on the island, have succeeded in deterring arrivals, at the expense of the fundamental rights which asylum seekers are increasingly deprived of. Just 239 people arrived by sea, a far cry from the thousands who used to arrive around a decade ago.
The Maltese government’s decision to fund and promote the obscure Malta-Libya Coordination Centre, along with its unofficial policy of coordinating pushbacks with the Libyan Coast Guard and refusing to respond to rescue requests within our Search and Rescue Zone (SAR), contributed heavily to the decline of sea arrivals.
“Longstanding issues in Malta’s SAR operations, with continued reports of unresponsiveness, pushbacks, and lack of transparency remained prevalent during 2024. The issue of lack of transparency on these incidents’ facts and decision-making processes has remained prominent,” the report reads.
“Local NGOs are largely left to rely on other organisations’ reports, news reports and clients themselves to gather information about Malta’s Search and Rescue operations,” it adds, further pointing out that most operations within our SAR zone are carried out by foreign NGOs and Italian authorities.
“When rescue operations were conducted or coordinated by the Maltese authorities, it remains difficult to access information including through official channels.”
The rejection rates at both the International Protection Agency (IPA) and its adjacent tribunal (IPAT) are startlingly high, both in the first instance and upon appeal. Both the IPA and the IPAT are managed by political appointees, who serve at the whim of home affairs minister Byron Camilleri.
In 2024, 528 new applications for asylum were filed. 507 applications remained pending by the end of last year.
Click here for a larger version of this data chart
Click here for a larger version of this data chart
The asylum seekers that do make it to a detention centre are routinely deprived of their legal rights, with the report describing how detained applicants are forced to submit their asylum requests before advocacy NGOs like aditus are allowed to interact with them.
When those interactions do occur, they are extremely limited. NGOs must obtain the details of individuals held in detention before being able to talk to them. New arrivals are faced with an effective communications blackout, depriving them of legal counsel at a crucial moment in their asylum process.
In one significant case, at least one group of Bangladeshi nationals were “voluntarily” returned to their country of origin without being informed about their right to seek asylum.
“NGOs reported they received consistent testimonies of applicants arriving in 2022, 2023 and 2024 claiming that the first people they met were individuals from the Returns Unit from the Ministry for Home Affairs, who reportedly tried to urge them into signing declarations of voluntary departure by telling them that if they apply to asylum, they will remain in detention for 2 years before they are sent back to their country of origin,” the report states.
Generally speaking, punishing pitfalls await anyone who manages to obtain asylum but fails to obtain permission to renew it in a timely manner, with the IPA regularly withdrawing cases on the basis of incorrect procedure rather than whether the applicant merits asylum.