Recently Malta took the decision to address its budgetary problems by selling its passports. For €650,000 - about £550,000 - you can become a Maltese citizen.

If you're British or from any other EU member state this would be something of a waste of money, as we already have the right to reside, work or set up a business there should we wish to do so.

Of course, it isn't people from northern European climes looking for a bit of sunshine who form the Maltese government's target group.

It's wealthy non-Europeans who, by buying a Maltese passport, will be able to travel freely around all those European Union member states which have signed up to the Schengen Agreement, which fortunately doesn't include the Britain or Ireland.

This, however, does not let us completely off the hook.

True, if one of these new Maltese citizens tried to enter Britain or Ireland using the purchased passport, he or she would not have any automatic right to do so.

The problem, however, does not stem from freedom of movement within the EU, limited in Britain and Ireland by our non-membership of Schengen, but from freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services, defined by the European Union as "two of the 'fundamental freedoms' which are central to the effective functioning of the EU internal market."

To further quote the European Commission, these "freedoms" mean that an individual or a company "providing services in one member state (may) offer services on a temporary basis in another member state."

It isn't hard to imagine what kind of people will be looking to buy the freedom of Europe.

It's clear that many if not most will be criminals, and even those who are not technically criminals are unlikely to embrace the highest ethical standards, shall we say.

Perhaps some reader can correct me, but I can think of only one category of person who might have a good, honest reason to fork out all that money for a Maltese passport and that is a very small category indeed, consisting of those people escaping political persecution or the abuse of their fundamental rights and who happen to be able to lay their hands on half a million quid.

As I said, a very small group indeed.

A much bigger group of passport-buyers are likely to join the growing band of practitioners of organised crime taking advantage of the EU's lack of internal borders.

So should we welcome the fact that the European Commission is planning a legal challenge to Malta's new citizenship law?

The answer is a definite no, despite the problems Malta's law could cause.

The Lisbon Treaty, while transferring many powers from national capitals to Brussels, did confirm that granting citizenship remains the prerogative of member states.

The commission believes it has found a way round this, as another section of the treaty obliges member states to act in a way "pursuant to the principle of sincere co-operation."

This is typical of the insidious double-talk of eurospeak. The EU is not about real co-operation between sovereign nations, but about undermining their governments' ability to control their own policies - to do, in other words, what they are elected to do.

There are other possibilities. An International Court of Justice ruling exists which says that citizenship should involve real bonds with the adopted country, whereas Malta's requirements do not include even a brief period of residence.

In different circumstances it might make sense to look sympathetically at various proposals to dissuade Malta from this irresponsible course, but the commission's record of empire-building, of using broad and novel interpretations of treaty articles, court rulings and so on to increase its own powers, means that any such attitude would be naive.

This should be sufficient to restrain any knee-jerk reaction.

But in any case, whereas indignation at criminals being able to buy access to the EU while innocent and persecuted people seeking asylum in the face of repression are hounded in some cases literally to death, there is another side of the story which is equally disturbing.

Once again the commission is pouncing on a weak member state - at about 420,000, Malta's population is somewhat smaller than that of Leeds or Bristol - for sins not dissimilar to those committed elsewhere by more powerful countries.

In Britain, foreign nationals can apply for permanent residence if they have £10 million invested here.

In Spain you can get citizenship for just a bit less than it costs in Malta, but you do have to live there for five years first.

The Netherlands offers permanent residency to anyone investing €1.25m, a little over a million pounds.

Britain, like these other countries, has a perfect right to protest to Malta over its decisions, and in our case as non-participants in Schengen, we have an unquestionable right to exclude anyone attempting to enter the country on a passport which is essentially a piece of licensed fraud.

The exercise of this right, however, is rendered hypocritical by our own sale of residence permits to the rich.

We don't want Brussels telling us who can become British. What we do want is fair treatment for people seeking to live in our country. At the moment it's anything but fair.

This is a problem, however, that we must address ourselves, through solidarity, campaigning, compassion and pressure to change our own laws.