Letters to the editor - July 10, 2026

The price of impunity

Raphael Dingli of Għarb writes:

Justice delayed is justice mocked but, in Malta, the architects of state impunity are not punished - they are rewarded.

Yorgen Fenech finally stands trial for complicity in the brutal assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

That the wheels of Maltese justice chose this exact moment to turn, a staggering seven years after he was first charged and mere weeks safely past a general election, is a timing so cynical it borders on performance art.

Yet, while the country’s eyes are glued to the law courts, a far more insidious betrayal of democracy has been quieted into place at Castille.

Glenn Bedingfield, the single most aggressive instigator from within the Joseph

Muscat-era prime minister’s office (OPM) who spent years running a state-sponsored vitriol campaign against Caruana Galizia, has been sworn in as the minister for home affairs and security.

The independent public inquiry explicitly concluded that the state was guilty of creating a culture of impunity that directly enabled her murder.

Glenn Bedingfield was recently appointed minister for home affairs and security. Photo: Malta Police Force

It specifically flagged the systematic, dehumanising online campaigns designed to turn a journalist into a target. To take the very man who weaponised the OPM to lead those campaigns and hand him absolute authority over the Malta Police Force and national security apparatus is the ultimate middle finger to the rule of law.

This institutional capture comes at a moment of profound international shame.

The Media Pluralism Monitor has delivered a devastating verdict, ranking Malta second to last in the entire European Union for press freedom. Malta has systematically eroded its democratic guardrails to the point where only Viktor Orbán’s ( although he has gone only recently) Hungary performs worse within the EU bloc.

Reporters Without Borders continues to classify Malta’s media environment as highly “problematic”.

The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation has rightly sounded the alarm over the sickening irony of putting a “key operator” of these harassment campaigns in charge of internal security.

Consider the terrifying reality of Malta’s current power structure: the police force tasked with gathering intelligence and protecting whistleblowers is now overseen by a politician who helped build the very wall of impunity that protected the corrupt elite.

True justice cannot exist in a country where the people who manufactured the impunity are handed the keys to the police headquarters.

This is not the rule of law. It is the rule of political survival and the institutional capture is now absolute.