Out of Africa, and in limbo

Unlike Australia, Malta has abandoned indefinite detention for asylum seekers but tensions remain, writes James Button for The Sydney Morning Herald:

..In 2000, Malta received just 24 such migrants. Since 2002 nearly 4000 have come. Last summer a boat landed nearly every night - mostly from Libya, 300 kilometres to the south. The immigrants do not want to go to Malta, they see nearby Italy as a door to Europe, but are picked up when their often-unseaworthy boats enter Malta's rescue zone. On arrival they are fingerprinted. If they slip away to another European Union country and are caught, under EU policy they are sent back to Malta.

The numbers don't sound large, but they represent nearly 1 per cent of the population of 400,000. If the same proportion had come to Australia, it would have faced an influx of up to 200,000 asylum seekers. But Malta's approach differs from Australia's in a key respect. Since 2003 it has abandoned indefinite detention, and now imprisons people for a maximum of 18 months. The policy is still the toughest in Europe, with 1500 people detained in grim barracks and even tents. The EU wants the country's maximum detention time reduced to six months.

Why the human wave has reached Malta is unclear. It may be because Italy and Spain have tightened their controls or that more people are leaving from Libya, which is said to contain 1.5 million transient, sub-Saharan Africans. Whatever the reason, Katrini Camilleri, of Malta's Jesuit Refugee Service, says "millions of people [in Africa] are on the move. You can divert the flow but you can't stop it"...