Xewkija Villagers Turn Church Hall into Human-Rights Classroom: Gozo’s Oldest Parish Joins UN Review

**Community Session on Human Rights in Xewkija: Gozo’s Village Square Becomes Classroom for Democracy**

The parish hall behind Xewkija’s rotunda church filled faster than a summer festa firework sells out on Sunday. Pensioners arrived leaning on carved walking sticks, teenagers clutched mobile phones like rosaries, and a baker still dusted with flour slipped in at the back. They had come not for band marches or bingo, but for something rarer in Gozo’s oldest village: an open-floor conversation about human rights, Maltese-style.

Organised by the Gozo Regional Committee within the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society, the two-hour session was part of a nationwide “Listening Exercise” feeding into Malta’s next Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations. Yet the language was deliberately not diplomatic. Facilitators spoke in the fast-paced Maltese-Gozitan dialect peppered with English loan-words—“airbnb-ing of farmland”, “Facebook gossip that ruins reputations”—so that abstract UN articles suddenly felt as close as the village baker’s ftira.

Mayor Hubert Saliba opened with a statistic that silenced the room: Xewkija’s population has doubled since 1990, but green space per resident has shrunk by 45 %. “That, my friends, is a human-rights issue,” he said, linking overcrowding to mental-health stress. It was a characteristically Gozitan leap: here, the right to a view of terraced fields and the smell of wild fennel is as fundamental as freedom of speech.

Older attendees remembered when Tito’s partisans hid in Xewkija during WWII and when British troops commandeered village houses. Those memories framed the debate. Eighty-two-year-old Ċensu Pace recalled curfews and warned, “If we don’t teach our kids what rights cost, they’ll trade them for a cheaper phone plan.” Applause rippled across wooden pews older than Malta’s constitution.

Youth participation stole the show. Students from the Gozo College Secondary School presented a short film shot entirely on mobile phones. In one clip, a girl wearing the traditional għonnella costume is refused entry to a Valletta boutique; in another, a Syrian delivery cyclist is paid €3 an hour because “he should be grateful”. The film ended with the question: “Is our hospitality just a brand?” The room erupted in spontaneous debate louder than festa petards.

Tourism featured heavily. Xewkija, once a sleepy village known for its huge church dome, now sees 400,000 visitors annually drawn by Instagram shots of the nearby Mgarr ix-Xini cove. Residents complained that rental conversions have priced young families out. One woman broke down describing how her son emigrated to Canada after failing to find an affordable apartment. The facilitator noted the irony: the economic right to shelter colliding with the right to cultural continuity.

Yet solutions emerged. A farmer proposed a “community land trust” modelled on schemes in the Basque Country; parish volunteers offered to host after-school human-rights clubs using the church’s 18th-century sacristy; and the local band club suggested dedicating next February’s carnival float to the theme “dignity in diversity”, complete with papier-mâché scales of justice painted in the village colours of red and yellow.

By session’s end, participants had filled three flip-chart pages with pledges: lobby for a pedestrian zone around the square, create multilingual leaflets explaining tenants’ rights, and invite asylum-seekers to share meals during the village festa. The clerk typed furiously; these minutes will be forwarded to Geneva as “evidence of grassroots engagement”.

Outside, the evening air carried the scent of rosemary and the clink of goat bells. As attendees queued for complimentary imqaret, one teenager summed up the shift: “I came for the free pastry, but I’m leaving thinking that human rights start with not parking on the pavement so pushchairs can pass.” In Xewkija, that counts as a small revolution.