In which other European democratic country would a former Minister for Justice be found guilty of repeatedly breaking the fundamental human rights of the citizens and is retained by the prime minister in his Cabinet as Minister for Education, no less? 

In democratic Malta, that’s where... Malta, democratic in the sense of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. 

This was never about flowers and candles. Had it been about flowers, the florist in Jason Micallef, the then chair of V18, who was denounced by artists and writers for mocking Daphne Caruana Galizia’s last words, would have found no objection to our tributes. 

But the flowers and candles were about our right to protest the State-sanctioned assassination of a journalist who held the government to account and the impunity surrounding it.

Following the Constitutional Court judgment last Thursday, few people remember that Owen Bonnici was also Culture Minister at the time. In remarks to the press, both Bonnici and the prime minister refused to acknowledge the gravity of the judgment, and in true Muscatian fashion, went on to gaslight the entire country by mouthing the usual canard that “the institutions are working” but then discard the very institutions that have found against them.

What the government and the Labour Party have been doing since the court’s pronouncement is to downplay the judgment because this judgment is not just a judgment, and Bonnici and Abela know that. 

It is a scathing indictment of the culture of injustice perpetrated against the citizens by the State embodied in government minister Bonnici. The judgment is a treatise on the citizen’s right to protest and to freedom of expression and it will be pored over and studied for years. 

The judgment was also a win for democracy. It is a lesson in civics – a lesson in how to safeguard democracy by fighting for it every step of the way. Or else it will be taken away from us candle by candle, flower by flower by the Minister of Justice. 

It is a lesson in responsible citizenship, for the duty of a citizen is to resist the tyranny of government... every time.

What lessons in civics is the Minister for Education imparting to the pupils and students under his care? 

What subliminal (mixed) messages is the prime minister conveying to the thousands of children and young people sitting in classrooms across the country? That if you want accountability from your government, you’re an enemy of the State? 

Parents, the Minister for Education is the worst role model in responsible citizenship for your children

That if you disagree with your government, you are censored repeatedly by the Minister of Justice?

That if you dare to place a flower and a candle at the foot of the monument opposite the Courts of Justice to denounce the assassination of a journalist, you are asking to be heckled and beaten up by the government’s supporters, with the Minister of Justice as ringleader?

That, as long as you enjoy a huge majority, then to hell with the minority who is holding up a mirror to your failings.

That it is quite alright to harbour a minister in your Cabinet that has been repeatedly found by the Constitutional Court to have breached the fundamental rights of each and every citizen who has ever placed a candle a flower at the foot of the Great Siege Monument, for two whole years, every day, while at the same time mouthing mealy-mouthed platitudes about ‘good governance’?

Who will take responsibility for our children? Who will tell them that in having a Minister of Education found in breach of fundamental human rights, our government is already flouting their rights as children in preparing them to “live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, and in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity” as laid out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

Who will tell the parents that the government refuses to take responsibility by defending a minister found in breach of the law and thus imparting the worst civic lesson to their children?

We will if the government won’t.

Parents, the Minister for Education is the worst role model in responsible citizenship for your children. For this reason alone, he must go.

For our children.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is a Repubblika executive committee member.