Though a lawyer by profession, Robert Abela evidently needs reminding that he is the prime minister and not a member of the judiciary. When challenged to proceed against colleagues because of proven unethical conduct – a matter of political, not legal, responsibility – he has a habit of referring to the rule of law and due process and then quickly pressing the ‘pause’ button.
He did it again on Tuesday, soon after the parliamentary standards committee decided to publish a report in which Education Minister Justyne Caruana was found to have breached the code of ethics when she awarded a close friend a €15,000 three-month contract. As it happened, the Nationalist Party, by contrast, had just asked the Naxxar mayor to resign because of an “undeclared conflict of interest”.
“Let’s allow proceedings to take their course and then we will make the required decisions,” the prime minister told reporters. In terms of law, the standards commissioner’s report was not conclusive, Abela noted.
Does he need to be reminded? Neither were the findings of the FIAU conclusive, but they still played a crucial role in the political earthquake that rocked the country two years ago.
He stressed that, if the institutions and the rule of law were to be respected, the process had to take its course before decisions were made. Such a statement is unacceptable coming from a former consultant to a prime minister on whose watch the institutions were corrupted by design and the rule of law deliberately stifled.
Abela’s role as prime minister is not to judge his ministers and MPs as a court of law would, but on the basis of the moral standards and ethics expected of people in public life. It is judges and magistrates who ensure justice takes its course. His own obligation towards the country is to act swiftly in shouldering his political responsibility as defined by morality and ethics.
Both as a lawyer and an educated person, he is surely able to make a clear distinction between what is illegal and what is illicit. This distinction was explained in some detail in the report drawn up by the three judges who conducted the public inquiry into Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder.
The term illicit, they said, has a much broader meaning than the term illegal. What is illegal, because it violates a civil or criminal law, is also illicit, but not everything that is illicit is essentially illegal. Illicit includes all that can qualify as misconduct or misdeed for not being in line with the norms and rules considered to regulate proper conduct.
The three judges went on to note the importance of these basic distinctions when applied to the field of public administrative law. It was not enough, they said, for the public administration to act within the limits of the laws and regulations and for its conduct to be subject to the courts’ scrutiny when it is illegal. “The citizen needed to be more protected against the abuse from improper administrative discrimination, arbitrariness and abuse of power. This ensues by recognising the duty of public administrators to also act licitly according to the principles of good governance, which are the basic values of proper administrative behaviour.”
Abela would do well to commit that quote to memory. Of course, a prime minister cannot ignore the law.
But good governance demands action in line with the standards that go beyond legal provisions. It demands, in this case, that Caruana be relieved of her duties as education minister.