Opinion: Shocking ignorance

Prime Minister Robert Abela wants to change the European Convention on Human Rights. Why? Because he thinks it’s outdated and “needs to reflect today’s realities when it comes to irregular migration”.

Aditus lambasted Robert Abela’s “sheer obliviousness”.  The human rights organisation expressed concern about comments made by the incoming Chair of the Council of Europe, suggesting Abela “should revise his law notes” and labelling his statements as “worrying and embarrassing”.  Aditus was too mild.

Robert Abela’s main argument was that those antiquated conventions don’t apply to today’s migration situation. He stated that “the intensification of migration in Europe in recent decades could not have been envisaged by those who drew up a convention in 1947”.

Academics joined NGOs that condemned the prime minister’s speech.

First of all, the European Convention on Human Rights was signed in 1950 and entered into force in 1953. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. That’s neither here nor there.  However, stating that in 1947, those drafting those conventions had no idea about migration betrays a hollow ignorance.

The prime minister clearly has no clue about European history during that period.  The end of World War II brought the most significant population movements in European history.

Millions of Germans were being expelled from Eastern Europe, some who had lived there for generations, others who moved in during the Nazi occupation.

In Poland, Germans were rounded up by Polish militias and put in camps before being removed from the country.  In what was then Czechoslovakia, more than 2.2 million were expelled and their property expropriated.

In July 1946, 14,400 people a day were being dumped at the frontier with Germany. Hundreds of thousands were expelled from Hungary.  In Romania, tens of thousands of Swabian Germans left their ancestral homes.  By 1948 the pre-war German population in Romania of 780,000 had been reduced by half.

Virtually all the 500,000 Germans in then-Yugoslavia fled, were expelled or sent to labour camps by the victorious Communist partisan forces. At least 610,000 Germans were killed in the course of the expulsions.  By 1950, over 11.5 million Germans had been expelled or departed voluntarily from Eastern Europe, resulting in massive flows of migrants.

But it wasn’t just Germans who were moving.  In Poland and Slovakia, pogroms broke out against Jews.  Many were killed, but over 100,000 moved from those countries to Western powers’ occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Over two million Soviet citizens were returned by the Allies to areas under Soviet control.

Two million people were moved out of the Eastern parts of Poland that were occupied by the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Croats and others fled westwards in fear of reprisals for wartime collaboration with the Nazis.

Those lucky survivors from the liberated Nazi concentration camps began their long road back to their countries – France, Italy, Holland and elsewhere. Primo Levi described his own long journey home to Turin from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he was imprisoned, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany in his 1963 book The Truce.

He witnessed huge masses of displaced people on the roads and trains throughout Europe. Clearly, Robert Abela hasn’t read The Truce or Primo Levi’s masterpiece If This Is a Man, an epic lesson in humanity when faced with man’s worst barbarity.

When those migrants reached their destinations, if they ever did, their integration wasn’t easy.  Europe was devastated, millions had been killed, and whole cities had been razed to the ground.

Europe’s bankrupt states were far too preoccupied with trying to feed their own citizens and rebuilding their cities to have much compassion to spare. And yet, in the midst of such desperation, the international community responded to that massive refugee crisis with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

Far from having no clue about migration, as Abela ignorantly claims, those who drew up that declaration were witnessing the biggest human migration in Europe’s history in appalling conditions.

That declaration was a direct result of that massive wave of migration. It guaranteed a “right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”.

The 1951 Geneva Convention defined refugees, accorded them specific rights and prohibited their forcible return from countries of refuge.

That declaration was driven by the sheer horror of the suffering endured by millions of migrants who’d just survived the most brutal war in history. Those who drew up those declarations were driven by a deep desire to spare the human race from enduring what it had just endured again.

Those declarations were born out of a new hope that the human race would never again inflict such unspeakable barbarism on itself.

Robert Abela seeks to belittle the traumatic experiences of those who drew up those conventions.  He insinuated that they knew nothing about migration despite their own raw experiences.

Those who drew up those conventions were driven by a humanity that recognised the inherent dignity of every human being.  They knew that only through strengthening the rights of every person can individuals protect themselves against their own worst instincts.

They knew that freedom, justice, and peace could only be achieved by bestowing equal and inalienable rights on all. The member states of the UN pledged to promote universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Instead, Malta’s prime minister made an utter fool of himself.  “Malta will remain at the forefront of fighting for human rights, as long as they are merited”, he said.

The definition of “inalienable” rights is that they cannot be taken away.  Human rights are not earned or merited.  Abela cannot decide who “merits” human rights and who does not.

The most fundamental element of human rights is that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”.

As the authors of the Declaration noted, “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”.

Robert Abela’s assertion that rights must be “merited” is nothing less than “disregard and contempt” for human rights – and we know where that leads.