Malta Refuses to Let Boat Refugees Land despite EU Pressure

Malta refused Tuesday to allow 102 migrants rescued from a leaking dinghy on to the island despite pressure from the European Commission to let them disembark on humanitarian grounds.

The migrants, including a four-month-old baby and four pregnant women, were rescued from their badly damaged inflatable boat on Monday by the Liberian-flagged Salamis oil tanker 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the Libyan coast.

The Maltese interior ministry said in a statement that the authorities had told the captain of the Salamis he had no permission to enter Malta's territorial waters.

EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem had said that the refugees should be allowed to land on Malta "as soon as possible."

The Maltese government claimed that a patrolling Italian navy ship had ordered the Salamis to take the migrants to the nearest available port, in this case in Libya.

The alleged refusal by the captain to obey this order "created an expectation that Malta should shoulder international obligations which would have never been incumbent upon it had the master complied," Malta's deputy attorney general Donatella Frendo Dimech said in a statement.

Malta insists the refugees had no need to disembark because they had already been rescued and their lives were not at risk.

But Malmstroem said it was "the humanitarian duty of the Maltese authorities to allow these persons to disembark."

"Sending the ship back to Libya would be contrary to international law," she said.

With the ship closest to Malta, a dispute over the rights and wrongs of the case "does not help the persons in immediate need," she added.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa have braved the seas in dangerously ill-equipped vessels operated by traffickers to get to Italy and other parts of the EU in recent years, many paying with their lives in the rickety boats.

Malta had a record 880 arrivals in July with some 1,200 in total having landed on the island so far this year.

Italian Interior Minister Angelo Alfano has likened the traffickers to "merchants of death", who must be stopped.

Since 1999, more than 200,000 people have arrived on Italy's southern Lampedusa island, which is, along with the Greece-Turkey border, one of the biggest gateways for undocumented migrants and refugees into the European Union.