Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1545722
The following are excerpts from the interview. The full interview can be found on maltatoday. com.mt as well as our Facebook and Spotify pages. PHOTOS: JAMES BIANCHI / MALTA TODAY 5 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 5 JULY 2026 INTERVIEW What exactly is statelessness? In this document, we're talking only about stateless children. It's when a boy or girl is a citizen of no country in the world. How does one end up like this? There are many ways. Imagine a baby is found without their parents. That baby would be stateless and cannot be granted any citizenship. It can also happen if a child cannot inherit their parents' citizenship. In some countries mothers don't inherit citizenship if the fathers are out of the picture. It could be the case that the child's parents cannot go back to their country, so they cannot go and register their child with their country's authorities. At this moment, we're only talking about stateless children. We're not calling for citizenship for all children who are born in Malta. This is for those few cases of children who are already here who are not citizens. How different is life for a stateless child? About 15 years ago I was helping some children at an open centre with their homework and there were about four children aged between four and eight years old. I asked them their names and where they were from. I can still picture the look on their faces when I asked them and they responded in Maltese: "We're from Malta obviously." I froze because they were right; my question didn't make sense. They were Maltese in every sense of the word. They spoke Maltese, they went to school here, they played football for local clubs, two of them were altar boys. At least two of these children's parents couldn't go back to their country to register them because of persecution. These children don't feel like they're from their parents' countries, they've never been there. They speak to their parents in Maltese. Nowadays, they're over 18 years old and I've seen the challenges they face due to being stateless. After they finished obligatory education at 16, they had trouble opening bank accounts, applying to courses, one of them was treated as a third-country national when he started working. They told you they were Mal- tese, but they didn't have Mal- tese citizenship, right? Exactly. When they grew up and I could speak to them more clearly about their situation, they felt like they were Maltese, but Malta wouldn't recognise them as such. If we give Maltese citizenship to these children, wouldn't that open the door for their parents to be entitled to citi- zenship? Children's rights are separate from the rights of their parents. Giving children citizenship doesn't automatically grant it to their parents. In EU countries where they give citizenship to stateless children, there's no automatic link to giving parents citizenship. Another point I'd like to clear up is that we're not talking about giving citizenship to each child born in Malta… At the end of the day, government can dictate the policy to make sure the rights of children and their parents are separate. Doesn't this risk sending a message to irregular immi- grants wanting to come specif- ically to Malta for this reason? This is a fear that I understand but it doesn't make sense. People run away from their country due to wars and persecution, not because some country has a procedure specifically for stateless children. Being identified as stateless isn't easy, and as far as I know there's no study that shows people risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean because there's a chance their children are identified as stateless and another chance they can get citizenship. No one would risk their life or the life of their children on such a probability. On top of that, if this policy is enacted, you won't have many people running to register themselves as stateless. If one is found not to be stateless, there is a risk of deportation. I don't think anyone who isn't stateless would give their information and make it easier for authorities to deport them. When you speak to govern- ment, not just about this specific proposal, but foreign- ers in general, what sort of feedback do you get? There is currently a feeling out there where people say that there are too many people in Malta. When we launched the policy paper, some people approached us and said, "It's not that we don't want to help these people, but we're at our limit." We understand where this is coming from. Everyone gets stuck in traffic, and everyone feels as though our infrastructure isn't keeping up. But this is happening by design. Our exaggerated economic growth which is fuelled by thousands of incoming people each year creates these problems… Government has the option to stop this, it's not as though our economy is a god and we have to serve it. On top of that, we cannot ignore how tourists are stretching our resources as well… What we believe is that we shouldn't channel our anger at these children, but our economy. There's no secret about public sentiment when it comes to foreigners. Do you think such changes are possible in this climate or is this a lost battle? I think it's important that we tell the truth. These children won't go anywhere. What's the point of not acknowledging a group of people who feel part of Malta? If this policy is enacted, it's important that the truth about people's realities comes out. People aren't angry at immigrants, but the effects of the economic model which was chosen by government.