Watch: MEP Alex Agius Saliba Blocked From Addressing Helena Dalli In Maltese And Calls Out Language Discrimination
PL MEP Agius Saliba was blocked from addressing Malta’s EU Commissioner Helena Dalli in Maltese at the European Parliament due to a lack of available interpreters.
During a recent sitting of the EU Employment Committee, Agius Saliba started speaking to Dalli in Maltese about a gender-based discrimination directive that the European Commission had proposed some 14 years ago.
However, he was quickly stopped in his tracks and was told by an official that there weren’t any interpreters available to translate his speech. Dalli laughed awkwardly and told Agius Saliba that “only I can understand you”.
Agius Saliba proceeded to deliver the rest of his speech in English but not before making his opinion crystal clear.
“This keeps happening in this committee, we have been complaining for weeks about it, and we’re speaking here about discrimination against the Maltese language,” he said. “It’s totally unacceptable that I cannot speak to my colleagues in an official EU language. I will make my intervention this time around, but not if the situation repeats itself.”
In a post later on, Agius Saliba said the European Parliament should ensure Maltese is as accessible as any other European language.
“It is insulting to me that I have to address a fellow Maltese person in English simply because the European Parliament treats Maltese as an inferior language,” he said.
Agius Saliba’s intervention bears more than a few echoes of when former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, during his tenure as a PL MEP, criticised the European Parliament for stopping him from speaking in Maltese due to a lack of translators.
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