VALLETTA — A Moroccan asylum seeker locked in one of Malta’s migration detention centers during the COVID-19 pandemic wrote a poem about his troubles on the back of a Western Union credit transfer form.
“In the morning, I wish to be set free and in the evening I start crying. In this country, the slaves are being sold like flour,” it reads.
The person who penned that poem described life in the center as “similar to a siege” — a life of loneliness, despair and torture. “I wish to die a pleasant death,” he wrote.
The raw words of this one asylum seeker capture the general sentiment of many of the thousands of people who have sought refuge in Europe and found themselves detained on Maltese shores.
Malta’s detention centers were overcrowded before COVID-19. During the pandemic, processing times got much longer. Those inside the centers speak of a vacuum of information, a climate of hostility, regular suicide attempts and inhumane, undignified conditions.
The photographs and testimonies that follow — taken throughout 2021, after many detainees had been released — shine a spotlight on life in the centers from those who experienced it firsthand and explore how the pandemic exacerbated the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers caught up in Malta’s migration detention regime.
By September 2020, barely six months after the pandemic first hit Malta, the situation had degenerated to the point where the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) scheduled a six-day “rapid response” visit.
In its report, the committee highlighted five critical deficiencies, which it said “may well amount to inhuman and degrading treatment” — contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The breaches flagged included people who had tested positive for COVID being detained in the same spaces as those who had not. The damning findings also exposed how many asylum seekers were locked up 24/7 with nothing to do in depressing and filthy conditions — many of whom were left without even an inkling of how long they would be detained, or why they were even being detained in the first place.
A total of 1,400 people were detained in Malta — a country with a population of some 444,000 — at the time of the CPT’s visit. That year, 2,281 people were rescued at sea and disembarked in Malta, according to official U.N. Refugee Agency figures, causing the government to voice concern about the intake of migrants and asylum seekers, and call on other EU member countries to “show their support” and help with relocation. In 2021, the number of sea arrivals decreased significantly to 832.
In its report, the CPT acknowledged the challenge of a public health crisis combined with the arrival of relatively high numbers of migrants. “Nonetheless,” it said, “the State cannot derogate from its duty to ensure that all migrants who are detained are treated with dignity and held in humane and safe conditions. This was not the case at the time of the visit.”
Following a large decrease in the numbers of arrivals, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatović visited the centers in October 2021 and, while noting efforts made by the government to improve living conditions, reiterated a call for the authorities to take “immediate action to ensure dignified conditions for all those currently held there.”
A spokesperson for the Maltese government said in April that even before the committee’s visit, extensive maintenance work had started and all facilities used to house detainees had been renovated, and several initiatives implemented to ensure the well-being of detainees, including setting up a health center and better recreational facilities.
Pointing to the impact of COVID-19 in the centers, the government said the pandemic “has had no major impact on Malta’s closed reception facilities, mostly due to the setting up of a quarantine facility in collaboration with the Malta Red Cross and the high take-up of the vaccination against the virus.”
However, the quarantine facility set up by the government and the Malta Red Cross faced its own share of issues, with photographs showing the living conditions asylum seekers faced at the quarantine facility. The high uptake of COVID-19 vaccines, which was not disputed, took place in 2021 — months after the CPT’s visit.
Photos by Joanna Demarco, words by Julian Delia
This project was funded by the National Geographic Society and made possible with the help of aditus foundation.
*Kojo was one of the detainees asked to work in the center. “Every day we would wake up at 7 o’clock and work till more than 10 p.m. … When they rescued people from the sea, the officers were afraid because of the coronavirus, they didn’t want to approach them, so we had to go.” Kojo never got paid for his efforts, even though he worked all day every day for over nine months. The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture highlighted Malta’s “undignifying” treatment of detainees. “The State cannot derogate from its duty to ensure that all migrants who are detained are treated with dignity,” it wrote.
A screengrab from a video sent from an anonymous Twitter account for use in this project, from someone detained at the Hal Safi center. Many detainees reported not being allowed out of their rooms. In its report, the Council of Europe noted the “crammed” rooms in Hal Safi, with just 1.5 to 2 square meters per person. They recommended a minimum of 4m² per person.
Kojo and his friend would hold each other’s hands and pray every night for almost a year. They would say: “God help me. God encourage me. God protect every one of us in this camp. God help every one of us so we can be free one day,” he said. Another interviewee, Kouame, said conflict over different religious practices was a regular occurrence at the centers, something that was normally caused by a lack of an adequate space available for worship.
Hal Safi detention center
— a view of the closed-off outside area of the camp.
“We would play football in the yard, and sometimes the ball would get stuck, and the security guards would use bad language while getting it down. For many weeks they wouldn’t give us the ball, and for a while we had nothing to do, we’d just sit down or sleep … We were depressed in that situation because there was nothing to do,” said Farish, a detainee. The COE noted that in the Hal Safi camp “the regime of activities afforded to migrants was non-existent.” Hundreds of migrants in the center reported how they were prevented from having any kind of outdoor time, with many being confined to their dormitories 24 hours a day.
A bible belonging to one of the detainees.
A detainee’s list of contacts that he kept after his mobile phone was confiscated for entirety of the 10-month period in which he was in the center.
The COE noted that “migrants deprived of their liberty need ready and regular access to means of communication to remain in contact with the outside world.”
A Maltese-English dictionary belonging to a detainee, which he would use to look up names that he was called by the guards to report them to the director. The COE noted “custodial staff in detention centers … should be carefully selected and receive appropriate training. Staff should possess well-developed qualities in the fields of interpersonal communication and cultural sensitivity.”
Photo taken on a mobile phone of a shower without a showerhead in Hal Safi, taken by a detainee and sent in for this project. Because of the poor facilities, some detainees would collect water to pour over themselves using a broken water bottle. According to Kouame, most of the bathrooms were not clean because no bleach was allowed on the premises. “When they gave bleach, people would drink it,” Kouame said.
Kouame would allegedly witness suicide attempts every day throughout his 10 months in detention. “People are in detention and they don’t go out. Every day you’d be seeing these kinds of things … When we went out to share food in the morning, as soon as we left, there was one guy who took the clothes he was wearing, divided them into pieces and tied them like a rope.” The CoE “stressed the need for particular attention to be paid to the mental health and psychological state of foreign nationals in custody.” Aditus Foundation Director Neil Falzon had said that every week they received accounts of suicide attempts, self-harm, bullying and harassment.
Photo of people lying in bed in detention, taken by a detainee and sent in for this project. The COE wrote that “the migrants deprived of their liberty at both Safi and Lyster [centers] were locked into overcrowded units, with nothing to do and minimal contact with staff and the outside world, for prolonged periods without knowing when their situation might improve: essentially out of sight and forgotten.”
“Sometimes you’d wake up in the morning see soldiers training and shooting guns like we were in Libya … The people in there were people who have seen war, and they can hear gunshots in the background in the morning … When I was there, I knew that everything has a beginning and an end … I was hoping that one day, all this nonsense would come to an end,” said Akin, a detainee.
A photo taken on a mobile phone showing clothes hanging out to dry and beds outside. The COE noted that in sections of Safi “nearly all migrants only possessed one set of clothes. When they washed these, they had to borrow clothes from other migrants where possible until their clothes dried.” People sleeping outside was one of the first things Akin noticed when he was first taken to a detention center. “I went to the [administration] office to ask them about what was going on with people sleeping outside, and they told me I shouldn’t speak to anybody and that I should try to keep quiet so they’ll make it comfortable for me,” Akin claimed.
Moussa and his friend would care for each other, with small actions such as bringing food for one another. One thing Moussa could not stand in detention was that if he ever had to leave for an appointment (with an NGO representative, for example), he would be handcuffed. “It changed me, because I didn’t do any crimes, and they handcuffed me with people looking at me in the street — it made me feel ashamed,” he said. The COE had specifically warned authorities not to treat detainees as “criminal offenders.” Moussa said he couldn’t sleep the night before he was let out of detention. “I remember when I was in my bed and my friend told me to wake up, because today is freedom.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees.
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