There is a certain inescapable irony in the reactions to this year’s winner of the United Nations’ prestigious Nansen Award: Dr Katrine Camilleri, a human rights lawyer who for the past decade has worked to improve the lot of irregular immigrants, both in and out of detention.
It is ironic, for instance, that the same people who now fall over themselves to be among the first to congratulate Dr Camilleri on her extraordinary achievement, are also the only ones who have the power to actually effect many of the changes she has campaigned for over the past 10 years.
But that is precisely what happened. Of all the ministries and departments to sing Dr Camilleri’s praises, the first had to be none other than the Ministry of Justice and Home Affairs: the ministry which patented and created the selfsame detention policy that has arguably risen to become the single most serious human rights issue this country has ever seen.
In a brief message issued on Thursday, the Ministry applauded Dr Camilleri for her commitment in the face of criminal adversity – apparently under the erroneous impression that Dr Camilleri had been awarded by the UN for the arson attacks she and her family endured in 2005. In fact, the Ministry stopped short of enumerating any of Dr Camilleri’s actual achievements with regard to the defence of human rights... all of which were directed, not towards the extreme right-wing criminals who torched her house and car, but rather at the government’s own detention practices.
For instance: Dr Camilleri has constantly and unflinchingly pointed out that the government’s policy of arbitrary detention is itself a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In fact it is largely thanks to the combined efforts of JRS, UNHCR and the Peace Lab that the previously “indefinite” detention period was limited in 2004 to a maximum of 18 months. All three of the above NGOs, including Dr Camilleri, still argue that 18 months is an unreasonably long time to be detained. But while the Ministry loses no time issuing messages of congratulation, it has yet to revise this aspect of its detention policy.
Over the years, Dr Camilleri has highlighted numerous anomalies surrounding Malta’s immigration scenario. She has drawn attention to the plight of rejected asylum seekers, many of whom now find themselves victims of an impossible Catch-22 situation which denies them any legal means to eke out a basic living. She has complained that asylum seekers in detention are denied the right of judicial review. She has drawn attention to dubious disciplinary practices enacted arbitrarily by the Detention Services, including the isolation of individual detainees without any trial or right of appeal. She has repeatedly stressed the inadequacy of medical services offered to persons in detention. And to the best of our knowledge – which is admittedly limited by the government’s blanket policy of zero access to the media – none of these situations has been properly addressed.
Alongside representatives of UNHCR, Dr Camilleri last year revealed the ongoing practice of placing children and unaccompanied minors in detention, against all conventions regarding children’s rights. As recently as last Wednesday, Dr Camilleri raised the issue of single women detained at the Lyster Barracks alongside single men: another practice which flies in the face of all human rights conventions to which our country is supposedly signatory. Both these practices directly violate the government’s own policy on immigration, published in 2005 but never fully implemented.
So congratulations, Katrine. After all, it is only right and fitting that your efforts would be appreciated, not by the local authorities, but by an international organisation with a long and proven track record of upholding human dignity in the world.

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Roll of Honour

Who does Katrine Camilleri join in the Nansen award?

Annalena Tonelli
Italian aid worker Tonelli was shot dead on 2 October 2003 on the grounds of the tuberculosis hospital she founded in Borama, northwestern Somaliland. She devoted over 30 years to humanitarian work in Somalia, pioneering treatment of TB in Kenya and Somalia, working for HIV/AIDS prevention and control and campaigning for the eradication of female genital mutilation. Her life was threatened because an HIV-positive mother and child had been sent by ambulance to her hospital. It would appear some similar grievance against her nurture of the stigmatised sick led to her murder.

Luciano Pavarotti
Pavarotti annually hosted the “Pavarotti and Friends” charity concerts in his home town Modena, raising money for several UN causes. Concerts were held for War Child, and victims of war and civil unrest in Bosnia, Guatemala, Kosovo, and Iraq. After the war in Bosnia, he financed and established the Pavarotti Music Centre in the southern city of Mostar. In 2001 he received the Nansen Medal for his efforts to raise money on behalf of refugees worldwide. Through benefit concerts and volunteer work, he has raised more than USD1.5 million, more than any other individual.

Médecins Sans Frontières
Created in 1971 by a small group of French doctors, among them current French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, in the aftermath of the Biafra secession, MSF deploys 3,000 doctors, nurses, midwives and logisticians in more than 70 countries. MSF received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of its members’ continuous effort to provide medical care in acute crises, as well as raising international awareness of potential humanitarian disasters.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Roosevelt used her influence as an active First Lady from 1933 to 1945 to promote the New Deal policies of husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was a suffragist who worked to enhance the status of working women and supported the formation of the United Nations, founding the UN Association of the United States in 1943 to advance support for the formation of the UN. She was a delegate to the UN General Assembly in 1945 and chaired the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Akio Kanai
Akio Kanai was forcibly displaced and moved to Japan during the turmoil at the end of World War II. He began his humanitarian optometry work in 1983 in Thailand with Indochinese refugees, many of whom had lost or broken their glasses while fleeing. Kanai checked the sight of the refugees and, in doing so, started a long engagement with refugee work. He began cooperating with UNHCR in 1984, and has since conducted more than 24 missions to help uprooted people in Nepal, Thailand, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Marguerite Barankitse
A Burundian humanitarian, Barankitse began providing food and shelter to 25 children on 25 October, 1993, one of the worst days of the Burundi Civil War. With the help of European and Burundian friends she organized a help network that managed to provide care for a growing number of children. In May 1994 the Bishop of Ruyigi agreed to transform a former school into a children’s shelter called ‘Maison Shalom’. Her activities expanded to other cities such as Butezi and Gizuru. In 2004 an estimated 20,000 children had benefited from her help, either directly or indirectly.

Cardinal Arns
At the beginning of his term as archbishop, Paola Evaristo Arns sold the bishop’s palace and used the money to build a social station in the favelas of Brazil. A liberation theologian, he became one of the country’s most popular clergymen as an opponent of the military dictatorship, managing the project Tortura Nunca Mais (Never Again Torture) at the end of the 1970s. Cardinal Arns has told the impoverished majorities of Brazil that on Ash Wednesday, “if they can find meat to eat, which is rare, they should eat it, and do some good work to mark the day, because not eating meat is not the point” He defended his position by saying that “Canon law gives me full power to dispense people from abstinence; there is no problem”.