The Council for Europe’s anti-torture committee will be back in Malta next year to examine the treatment of detained people following a scathing report in 2020 that described “inhumane” conditions.
Malta is one of eight countries targeted for scrutiny in 2023. The last time the committee came here for a planned visit was in 2015.
It will also visit Albania, Armenia, Cyprus, Hungary, Luxembourg, North Macedonia and the Slovak Republic.
The committee last visited Malta in 2020 shortly after human rights NGOs said that they were being denied access to detention centres due to COVID-19 restrictions.
It found that Malta’s migrant centres during the pandemic were “unsafe, inhumane and illegal”.
Migrants had been “forgotten for months” and locked up in filthy and degrading conditions without adequate healthcare.
The report noted that there appeared to be no legal basis for the detention of the great majority of migrants who were held in severely overcrowded facilities under extremely poor conditions.
In addition, they were offered no meaningful activity or effective communication on their situation and were victims of restricted contact with the outside world.
The committee accused the government of breaking international law and flouting European values.
Delegations from the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CPT) are granted unlimited access to places where people are deprived of their liberty, including prisons and detention centres.
The aim is to strengthen the protection of detained people from ill-treatment.
The committee’s conclusions are then submitted to the government in a confidential report.
As it announced planned visits for 2023, the committee invited individuals with information that could assist the delegation to bring it to its attention through a specific link on its website.
CCF prison likely to fall short
Experts in the field told Times of Malta that although the situation regarding detained migrants seems to have improved, ostensibly due to the sheer drop in the number of migrant arrivals on the island, the committee is expected to have a tough job assessing conditions at the Corradino Correctional Facility, the country’s only official jail.
The prison authorities snubbed an annual Council of Europe report on prison populations in member states, ignoring a questionnaire sent last September.
The 2021 penal statistics report covers only 49 of the 52 prison facilities in the 47-member Council of Europe after Malta’s prison and two of three facilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina ignored the request for information.
Known as SPACE I and compiled by a research team from the University of Lausanne, the report focuses on prison populations and the penal institutions in which they are held.
The Corradino facility has been under the spotlight in recent months following a string of suicides.
Official figures show how suicides quadrupled under controversial director Alex Dalli’s tenure.
In the four years that Dalli was at the helm of the prison, eight inmates died by suicide, compared to just two in the previous four years.
The former army colonel had run the prison since 2018 before he suspended himself from his position in November and was replaced by Robert Brincau, formerly of the Red Cross.
While he was praised for weeding out drugs from Corradino, Dalli had consistently been under fire for his unorthodox methods of discipline, which reportedly included a poster that told officials to “teach fear” and a restraining chair to which unruly inmates were strapped.