Illegal immigrants at Safi go on hunger strike

Illegal immigrants at Safi camp have gone on hunger strike again, insisting that the authorities should try them in court and if found guilty send them to prison, rather than keep them in detention indefinitely.

"We want to be tried in court. We are no longer interested in the asylum process. We have been detained since our arrival in 2002 even though we are not criminals, we are just illegal immigrants," one of them said yesterday.

The immigrant, who claims to be Liberian, said he left his country because of the war and his life would be in danger if he returned home.

He said that living conditions at Safi were unbearable. "We are experiencing mental and physical hardship. We are 14 in one room and all of us - we are about 80 - have to share three toilets and four showers."

He said that on arrival in Malta he and others had applied for refugee status, which was refused on grounds that it could not be proven that he was Liberian. He had not been informed that he was being interviewed to see if he was entitled to refugee status and thought the police were interrogating him.

The immigrant realised that the Refugee Commissioner was questioning him when it was too late. He has since not appealed the negative decision due to a lack of legal assistance.

"The fact that we have no documents to prove our nationality does not make us criminals. The police have asked me twice if I want to be sent back to Liberia.

"If they are willing to send me home to Liberia, it means they know I come from there. I left persecution at home to be persecuted here in another way," he said, adding that he was no longer asking for his freedom.

"If they want to sentence me, I am willing to be tried in court. I am willing to face life imprisonment, but please do not leave me here without a trial."

The conditions at Safi, he said, were worse than those prisoners had to face. When immigrants were at first kept in tents they were in a better situation because then at least they could move about, he added.

Currently, they could only go out for an hour a day and for the rest of the time they were locked inside "as if in a cage", he claimed.

Another immigrant, who is here with his family, said: "We do not know what is happening and our wives are suffering from depression. I am scared that if something is not done soon my wife will end up in a mental hospital.

"Judge us and sentence us but please do not keep us like this," he pleaded.

Meanwhile, an immigrant at Hal Far said yesterday that immigrants had stopped their last hunger strike after they were promised that the Home Affairs Minister would visit them.

But the minister had still not visited them and "we still do not know the outcome of our being here. We are depressed and forgotten," he said.

In a recently issued report entitled Concerns in Europe and Central Asia: July-December 2003, Amnesty International (AI) said that living conditions in the detention centres in Malta continued to fall short of relevant international standards, giving rise to ongoing tensions and protests within the centres, including frequent hunger-strikes.

"Many people were held in facilities not originally designed as detention centres, with reports of people in some centres suffering severe overcrowding and highly inadequate sanitary arrangements.

"Some inmates, including children, had little or no regular access to exercise in the open air, spending most of the day inside the detention centre, with no recreational facilities.

"School-age children detained with their relatives faced lengthy delays in gaining permission to leave the detention centres during the day to attend local schools, with the result that a number of children were deprived of education for six months or more.

"The overall treatment of detained children appeared to fall short of the requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child."

The report also referred to the plight of 220 Eritreans who had been deported back home in September and October 2002. According to its information, the deportees were detained on arrival at the airport in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, and that foreign embassies and journalists had not had access to them since.

AI explained, however, that several Eritreans who had recently arrived in Sudan and made contact with AI and representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that they had been among the deportees and had only recently escaped from detention in Eritrea.

They stated that all those deported from Malta had been detained on arrival at the airport and none had been allowed any contact with their families since their return.

The deportees were taken to Adi Abeto military detention centre, near Asmara. After some days the women, children and persons over 40 were taken away.

AI pointed out that it was possible that they had been released, but that it had received no confirmation of this. The remaining detainees - some 180 people - were kept in detention and tortured over a period of two and a half months.

Some tried to escape but were recaptured: three were shot, one man dying from his wounds.

In December 2002 all remaining detainees were transferred to a secret detention centre on the main Dahlak Island in the Red Sea, where they were subjected to forced labour. Some were moved to secret mainland prisons in July 2003, from which several later escaped across the Sudan border.

AI urged the Maltese government to ensure, as a matter of highest importance, that asylum-seekers were not forcibly returned to a country of origin, directly or indirectly, where they would be at risk of serious human rights abuses.

It called on the government to look more closely at the human rights situation in Eritrea and not to deport Eritrean asylum-seekers to Eritrea while there were well-grounded fears that they could be detained or tortured.

AI said it had written to the Home Affairs Minister informing him about all this in October but it has it had not received any reply by the end of December.