Lurching right

Robert Abela hasn’t finished shutting down civic rights. This week, he concluded the project to abolish citizens’ access to the courts when the police ignore corruption or, frankly, any crime committed by individuals enjoying political influence. He marched triumphantly out of parliament to the sound of ringing pots and pans banged by protesters. He expects that protesters can’t do much more than shout and he’s determined to double down on his campaign to eliminate the last remnants of transparency in the opacity that envelops his power.

This week, we learned that he intends to use his parliamentary majority to remove yet another civic right. This one is not quite as ancient as the newly abolished right to request magisterial inquiries. It’s a right – introduced by Joseph Muscat’s government when it was still brand new and untouched by the never-ending list of scandals that have beset it since – allowing citizens to ask a commissioner for standards in public life to investigate allegations of unethical conduct by ministers.

That right, used wisely by active citizens – Arnold Cassola foremost among them – seeking no reward for themselves, led to the exposure (and resignations) of individuals like Justyne Caruana, Rosianne Cutajar and Clayton Bartolo. Thanks to this civic right, we were relieved of the burden of employing these people. Abela has long deemed this an unacceptable inconvenience. He thought he solved the problem by changing the law his predecessor introduced, removing the need to obtain the agreement of the parliamentary opposition when choosing the commissioner who conducts these investigations.

He believed he could hire a compliant puppet for the position, exactly what he intended to do. His choice of Joseph Azzopardi ultimately disappointed Abela. Azzopardi proved to be no puppet. Investigations into ministers’ conduct continued vigorously, and, now, Abela has declared that it is time to close this relic from an era when the concept of civic rights was still valued.

The unforgivably indifferent majority who expect never to miss enjoying their right to request an ethics investigation or a magisterial inquiry into corrupt conduct will blow raspberries at the concerns of protesters.

Their pulse will be even less affected by recent threats from Abela to eliminate the previously mainstream idea that all humans must enjoy fundamental rights. Abela seeks to exclude African migrants from eligibility, asserting that human rights need only be respected based on “merit”. The implication is clear: if one does not merit human rights, one is regarded as less than human.

Whether they are virulent white supremacists or garden variety, local-shop-for-local-people islanders, many will assume that denying rights to black migrants is, quite literally, a problem for somebody else.

Abela lashed out at a magistrate for making decisions that embarrassed him. He implicitly warned the other magistrates of what would happen to them if they made decisions he did not wish for them to.

Abela organised a motion of censure against Karol Aquilina, a particularly prickly opposition MP. He implicitly warned other MPs that he would give no quarter to them should they dare to cause him any discomfort.

While Abela attacks activists, magistrates, MPs and lawyers representing vulnerable clients, the rest of us need not worry about him harming anyone else.

Standards Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi proved to be no puppet- Manuel Delia

There’s the rub. It’s usually about someone else. Until it isn’t. It’s perhaps pointless to warn the ambivalent that the denial of others’ rights enables the subsequent denial of their own when it suits the powerful to take them away. If migrants are denied access to lawyers, a fair hearing and due process when their hopes for application are bluntly ignored, and are forced onto planes or ships away from here, you may, one day, be denied access to lawyers, a fair hearing and due process should your rights and interests ever conflict with someone who has the power to declare you ineligible for human rights.

They don’t see it, however. They fail to recognise that removing the right to request magisterial inquiries denies access to justice. The public humiliation of Jason Azzopardi also represents a denial of access to legal representation. The threat of severely punishing Cassola for annoying the authorities amounts to an erosion of rights.

With our noses buried in our phones, battling our personal struggles to keep up with monthly expenses, navigating our ambitions for accumulated wealth and assessing our fulfilment through the satisfaction of spending, the ethical behaviour of ministers and their adherence to criminal law is inevitably a distant concern. Perhaps even more clearly, the struggles of others whose rights are stripped away barely register above background noise.

Today’s reality has isolated us in our individual worlds. Our life stories are unconnected from the narratives of others. Our citizenship serves merely as an entry ticket, allowing us to extract what we need from the state. If we could avoid engaging with the state altogether, that would be our first choice.

Our self-reliance has separated us from any possibility of solidarity, from any empathy for the fates of others and from the ability to be concerned about how our state is run because why should we care about that which we do so much to avoid?

In this reality, where indifference is a necessary coping mechanism, the powerful are emboldened to act with impunity. They can easily dismiss any resistance to their plans, utterly confident that there will be no outcry, no indignation, nothing louder than the faint cries of a crowd of protesters they can choose to ignore.

This is why our politics is lurching inexorably rightward: we allow it. We’re too bored, too tired and too indifferent to be shocked by its swift abandonment of decency, empathy and solidarity.

Abela can do this precisely because you cannot bring yourself to care that he shouldn’t.