AUM silent on alleged deportation threats against students after nine left Malta

The American University of Malta (AUM) continues to maintain total radio silence on serious allegations concerning the institution’s Director of Student Affairs, David O’Shaughnessy, who students claim threatened to go out of his way to ensure they’d be deported if they ran away from Malta.

According to multiple independent sources consulted by The Shift, O’Shaughnessy made these threats during an urgent meeting with a cohort of Afghan students at the end of last year.

The meeting was held following the irregular departure of at least nine students from a cohort of around 35 students who came to Malta after being forced to flee their home country in the wake of the Taliban’s seizure of power.

While the whereabouts of the women who left Malta are not fully known, it is understood that they sought to reconnect with family members across Europe after enduring a gruelling journey towards Europe and being separated from them for years.

Multiple testimonies described a tense meeting in which O’ Shaughnessy, who’s been employed at AUM for the past three years, warned all remaining students that should any of them decide to abscond, AUM would go out of its way to ensure that they inform authorities in other European countries about their whereabouts and report them for deportation.

“The university and our scholarship funders both told all of us during a three-hour meeting that if we continue fleeing AUM to go to another country, they have connections that they would use to get us reported and deported to Afghanistan,” one source told The Shift.

The European Court of Justice had previously recognised the Taliban’s oppression of Afghan women as “persecution”, with the total lack of protection from gender-based domestic violence, forced marriage, forced veiling and restrictions on education, employment, healthcare, movement, and political participation described as a “violation of human dignity”.

“They told us they brought us here to study, not to flee. So if we are going to do that, they will take that action. They kept saying they have strong connections across Europe and that all they need to do is send an email. So that’s why we are so scared,” the source added.

Another source described being taken aback by the “disrespectful” tone of the conversation, feeling they were being “shamed” into submitting to AUM’s instructions while avoiding any attempt to find alternative arrangements to continue their studies.

Both sources said that the Afghan students began leaving Malta right after the departure of AUM’s former rector, Victoria Fontan, who resigned in December.

“I think the fact that they kept us in the dark for so long about what is going on with our accreditation and with our residency permits made people very anxious… so seeing Fontan leaving without a clear explanation made everyone’s anxiety worse. We were getting different answers from different people, and some of us lost patience,” the source explained.

Despite weeks of attempts to contact O’ Shaughnessy to obtain his version of events, no response was forthcoming from the Director of Student Affairs or his employers.

Additionally, the Office of the Prime Minister and the Home Affairs Ministry are refusing to respond to The Shift’s questions about the Maltese government’s unannounced decision to suspend the issuance of visa documents for all inbound Afghan nationals.

The Shift is informed that the blanket ban was imposed following AUM’s failure to adequately address its students’ needs and their subsequent departure from the island.

The government did not make any public announcement about its decision to suspend visas for Afghan nationals, unlike when Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri published an announcement on the temporary suspension of asylum applications from Syrian nationals in 2024.

The government failed to explain whether the suspension is indefinite. It is also yet to explain why it felt like implementing such a far-reaching suspension was a proportionate response to the actions of a handful of individuals fleeing persecution.

This newsroom is also reliably informed that the institutional failures which led to the departure of these nine former AUM students sparked a diplomatic row with the US State Department, given its involvement in providing scholarship funding to the cohort that eventually reached Malta.