Cabinet is considering presidential pardons for three students and a lecturer who stand accused of having hacked into a popular app.

If it goes ahead with that plan, it will be a repeat of cabinet’s 2024 decision to pardon those who fraudulently received disability benefits.

Let’s set aside the merits of the hacking case itself. Let’s also ignore the questionable use of the executive branch of government to subvert decisions of the judicial branch. Instead, let’s focus our attention on the very different way the government is handling this situation, versus the way it tackled another, arguably more controversial one.

When Jason Azzopardi filed a flurry of requests for the courts to investigate Labour ministers, it took the government just a few weeks to draft and present a bill to totally overhaul the system of magisterial inquiries.

Robert Abela angrily ordered the reform on December 15. On January 30, the Justice Minister presented it to the country. It took 45 days (and that included the Christmas period) to dramatically reform a judicial function.

The justification was that one man – Azzopardi – was abusing the system and terrorising ministers with vexatious inquiry requests.

Compare that to the hacking situation. The students hacked into student app Freehour in October 2022. They were arrested one month later. Times of Malta revealed the story on April 12, 2023 – 700 days ago.

Academics, politicians and lawyers said we need to update laws to prevent such prosecutions. The government indicated it does not want the students prosecuted.

And yet no change to hacking laws has been presented to parliament, much less fast-tracked to becoming law. Drafting a plan to protect ministers took 45 days. Seven hundred days were not enough to protect ethical hackers.

If ministers and their families lived in a state of shock for three months as a result of Azzopardi’s requests for probes, what must these young students’ families be feeling?

They are facing actual criminal charges, not requests for investigations that may or may not lead to such charges. And the charges they face have already led to tangible impacts on their lives.

Last year, the students were barred from taking part in a European cybersecurity competition due to concerns over investigations.

Their budding careers have been nipped. They now face the prospect of convictions or, at the very best, years of having their names linked to crimes.

The government’s plan to grant pardons to the students is an easy way out of this mess. It allows Abela to end the bad publicity, without doing much to prevent a repeat. But his government’s lethargy in fixing the underlying problem exposes the government’s double standards.

And they do not end there. Justice Minister Jonathan Attard said there is no need to hold a public consultation about the inquiry reform, because legislators “have enough knowledge” about what needs to change.

That knowledge, he said, comes from court sentences and decrees. What a shame the Chamber of Advocates and at least two former chief justices think otherwise.

Irrespective of whether or not you agree with Azzopardi’s methods, it is undeniably a bad idea to draft laws that impact all citizens based on the actions of just one.

Azzopardi’s overzealous inquiry requests allowed the government an opportunity to sway its grassroots with a simplistic tale of good and evil – a story of ‘brave ministers’ reporting for duty while worried sick about magisterial investigation.

The government saw that opportunity, and in 45 short days it snatched it. As for the young hackers? Tough luck guys. Next time, try politics.