Refugee rights advocate Camilleri, a Maltese hero, makes Politico’s list of 28

The Jesuit Refugee Service’s director Katrine Camilleri has been selected as the Maltese personality to watch among 28 selected by Politico, the EU affairs magazine.

The human rights lawyer was awarded the Roland Berger Human Dignity Award in April 2015 and is a former winner of the U.N.’s Nansen Refugee Award.

“Ranking 28 European high-fliers is devilishly complicated. How to evaluate a Croatian entrepreneur alongside a Maltese humanitarian, an Italian constitutional lawyer alongside a Belgian musician, an Irish gay-rights activist alongside a Polish bishop? Our rankings are bound to please and displease readers in equal measure, but our aim has been to spark discussion and debate,” Politico’s Matthew Kaminski and Tunku Varadarajan write.

“We started off by asking: Who are the most eye-catching people in each of the 28 states of the European Union, from Austria to the United Kingdom? Our aim — our conceit, if you like — was to identify persons who don’t command attention merely by virtue of the office they hold. So there’s no Angela Merkel for Germany, for example, and no Alexis Tsipras for Greece,”

But there is Viktor Orbán from Hungary, the prime minister who challenged the Europe of open borders and its notions of representative democracy. He was joined by Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager, who is rewriting the rules of global business from her post as the EU’s competition commissioner. And Britain’s Nicola Sturgeon and Spain’s Albert Rivera are both, in their own ways, reshaping their nations: pne is fighting to leave hers, the other to keep his intact.

Katrine Camilleri is described as a long-time advocate for the creation of safe routes of passage for those fleeing war zones and seeking a better life in Europe.

“[She]] could have warned EU leaders of the potential seriousness of the situation at any point over the past two decades… Camilleri and her team remain at the forefront of the struggle, offering legal advice and pastoral care, and making sure refugees have access to health care. She is also a prominent voice in warning the government in Malta, and authorities further afield, of their responsibilities. This has often come at a cost. In 2006, her car and home were damaged in arson attacks. The perpetrators were never caught.”

“We must take refugees’ needs into account,” she says, adding that “protection is about more than being safe: People eventually want to be part of a community.” Supporting transit countries, as the EU is trying to do, is all well and good, but “no one wants to be housed in a camp forever.”

She says closing borders, as Hungary and others in central Europe have done, won’t stop people coming to Europe. It merely increases the risks they face. “Refugees aren’t coming because it’s easy. If it’s not one route, it’s another.”