Three men have been sentenced to six months effective imprisonment after pleading guilty to possession and use of false travel documents at Malta International Airport, a case that reflects the steady stream of prosecutions at Luqa under Malta’s strict passport and immigration laws. The men, intercepted by immigration police during routine border checks after arriving on flights from Greece, were found to have presented forged identity cards and passports that were later confirmed as counterfeit by the Police Forensic Science Laboratory, including fake French, Italian, Romanian and Irish documents purchased for a few hundred euros in an attempt to continue their journey into the Schengen area. Prosecuting Inspector Karl Roberts explained to the court that traffickers often devise schemes whereby migrants are set up as couples with small children or given European documents belonging to other nationals to bypass controls, and that the accused were part of such a transit route through Malta to Belgium and other northern European destinations.
Appearing before the Court of Magistrates as a Court of Criminal Judicature, the three admitted to charges under Article 5 of the Passports Ordinance, which carries a penalty of six months to two years for using a forged or tampered passport, Article 189 of the Criminal Code concerning forgery and use of forged documents, and Article 32(1)(f) of the Immigration Act for possession of a false document required for immigration purposes. Their legal aid lawyer argued that they posed no threat to national security, had no previous convictions and had made a serious mistake out of desperation, seeking a suspended sentence rather than immediate custody, but the court, noting that Malta jails hundreds each year for similar offences and that up to a third of the prison population at times consists of such cases, found that an effective custodial sentence was necessary to deter the abuse of travel documents and protect the integrity of border controls. Magistrate Kevan Azzopardi accordingly sentenced each man to six months imprisonment, with interpreters assisting throughout proceedings from Maltese to English and then to Albanian and Somali, and ordered that they be removed after serving their term, in line with established jurisprudence where asylum seekers and irregular migrants entering Malta with false documents are prosecuted regardless of their claim to protection.
