Human rights advocates call for improved treatment of detained migrants

The Malta Refugee Council has endorsed a report by the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee calling for Malta to improve the treatment of detained migrants.

“We welcome the report as a clear confirmation of the concerns repeatedly flagged by several of our members. In particular, we share the CPT’s findings that Malta’s detention regime verges on “institutional mass neglect by the authorities," with sub-standard living conditions exacerbating a disregard for international norms on the detention of persons,” the refugee council (MRC) said.

While it acknowledged the serious challenge faced by Malta, the MRC insisted that international human rights obligations bind the authorities.

The report, which was published earlier in the week, urged the authorities to change their immigration detention approach and ensure that migrants deprived of their liberty are treated with dignity and humanity.

The CPT said that Malta’s immigration system was struggling to cope. The committee said that a system that purely contained migrants, essentially forgetting them, was a regime that verged on institutional mass neglect by the authorities in poor conditions.

“Indeed, the living conditions, regimes, lack of due process safeguards, treatment of vulnerable groups and some specific COVID-19 measures were found to be so problematic that they may well amount to inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights,” the CPT said.

The committee said the design of detention centres such as Hermes Block and the Warehouses at Safi Detention Centre remained “totally inappropriate: large rooms crammed with beds, no privacy, and communication with staff via locked doors.”

The CPT said migrants were generally locked in their accommodation units with little to no access to daily outdoor exercise and no purposeful activities. Other deficiencies, the council said, included a lack of maintenance of the buildings, especially the sanitary facilities, insufficient person hygiene products and cleaning materials, and an inability to obtain a change of clothes. Moreover, the report said a systematic lack of information was provided to detained persons about their situation, compounded by minimal contact with the outside world and even staff.

“Vulnerable migrants, in particular, were not getting the care and support they required. Not only were young children and their parents as well as unaccompanied/separated minors being detained, but they were held in deplorable conditions, together with unrelated adult men. Clear protection policies and protocols for looking after vulnerable migrants need to be put in place,” the CPT said.

The committee said that Malta urgently needed to revisit its immigration detention policy towards one better steered by its duty of care to treat all persons deprived of their liberty with dignity.

The CPT stressed that the problem of migration into Malta was not new and would almost certainly continue given the factors that exist in those counties from which the vast majority of migrants come. Therefore, together with the EU and other member states, Malta needed to put into place an immigration detention system that abided by European values and norms.