Following a mass riot at the Ħal Far open accommodation centre on October 20, over 100 of the migrants have been sentenced to six weeks in prison at the Corradino Correctional Facility (CCF).
Reliable sources have reported gross and humiliating mistreatment of the migrants on their arrival at Corradino last week. They were allegedly ordered to strip off their clothes in the central courtyard, then “hosed down with a hose-pipe like animals,” as well as being physically manhandled by the Special Response Team using batons.
Although the Correctional Services Agency of Corradino has strongly denied the allegations of maltreatment, it is noteworthy that the Chief Operations Officer, Randolph Spiteri, later qualified this by stating that there was “no use of force other than the minimum required to control and restrain” [the prisoners].
The migrants have since been locked up in the notorious Division 6 building of the prison. It is the section of the Correctional Facility designed for prisoners to be left in solitary confinement and is commonly known as the place where inmates are sent to be punished (tal-kastig). One source described it as “a punitive and not a corrective division”.
Division 6, a 177-year-old Victorian, recently modernised remnant of the original prison – which was previously condemned by the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment – has 24 cells. The division normally holds no more than 30 to 40 prisoners. Each cell, with one bed, is now holding at least five times that number.
A foundation that works closely with prisoners, Mid-Dlam Għad-Dawl, which has done outstanding work at Corradino over several years, has expressed concern that the detention of an additional 107 prisoners would overwhelm the prison, which is already operating at overcapacity. The CCF “is housing over double the number of people it was designed to accommodate”.
The riot and the reports of the humiliating conditions under which those who have been sentenced to imprisonment for their part in it serve to cast yet another shadow over Malta’s treatment of black immigrants. Minister for Home Affairs and National Security, Michael Farrugia, has already conceded, through clenched teeth, in the face of widespread outcry by the public and NGOs who work closely with migrants, that an investigation into the affair will be conducted.
Minister Farrugia has to shoulder political responsibility for what has happened – even if many people misguidedly condone the heavy-handedness of the operation to control the riot and shamelessly welcome the grim conditions under which those sentenced are being held at Corradino.
The source of the cause of the riot must be exposed. Were the conditions at Ħal Far such a tinderbox that it only took a reaction to “three drunk migrants” to spark a serious riot? Every prisoner at Corradino – which is meant to be a ‘correctional’ facility not a punitive one – should be treated with dignity. Are the claims of humiliating mistreatment of these particular prisoners justified? Was there a racial element to this?
The fundamental issue is that, as a country which has been exposed to black immigration for 17 years, Malta cannot any longer delude itself into refusing to confront the acute social problems that mass immigration presents. What happened at Ħal Far is a wake-up call which must be heeded. The inquiry must also address this.