Neville Gafà says his actions at Daphne's shrine is free speech - he is wrong

OccupyJustice would like to make some clarifications in reaction to the Times of Malta report of April 26, entitled ‘A simmering clash over Daphne’s shrine in Valletta threatens to boil over’.

Neville Gafà claims that his actions are an exercise in free speech. Gafà is wrong. Covering our protest with his own placards, denigrating Daphne Caruana Galizia’s memory and destroying frames containing her photo is nothing short of extreme disrespect towards a journalist whose murder was deemed to have been caused by the State’s negligence.

On January 30, 2020, the constitutional court ruled that the repeated cleansing of the protest memorial, on the orders of then justice minister Owen Bonnici, was intended to restrict the protest and violated protesters’ right to freedom of expression. Judge Joseph Zammit McKeon had ruled that the fact that the government might have been annoyed at their protest objects’ placing was not reason enough to have them removed.

In a nutshell, the constitutional court ruled that we have a right to retain our protest memorial, also acknowledging its position as significant.

Furthermore, the government did not appeal this decision, meaning it acknowledged the outcome. It is for the government to now fulfil its duty of protecting our right to free expression and, therefore, to protect our protest from this vandalism.

Just because Gafà believes he is above the law by choosing to label the judgment as “ridiculous” does not justify his actions. Just because he disagrees with our ongoing protest, does not give him the right to drown our voice, our right to free expression. Of course, he has the right to protest (although against what is unclear) but not at the expense of our freedom of expression. What is the point of having a right if someone else has the right to stifle it?

To give a clear analogy, let us say that Gafà decides to exercise his right to build a mosque in Malta. He would not be given a permit to build it inside the premises of a Catholic church, next door, by all means but not within its existing perimeter. And that is exactly what Gafà is trying to hoodwink his followers into believing, that he can trample on other people’s fundamental rights to impose his beliefs just because he disagrees.

A comment posted by Neville Gafa

Not that Gafà needs our acknowledgement but, no doubt, he has the right to express his nastiness and hatred. He can do that anywhere in the country. Choosing to do it in place of our protest site after violently trashing it is not a right he has. He wants to suppress our right to free expression because he finds intolerable our opinion that justice should be served on the killers of a journalist.

If he exercises his right to express his hateful opinions without attempting to suppress ours, we can focus on the real issue here.

What is Gafà protesting against, exactly? His actions make no sense. If he is opposed to civil society placing placards, flowers and candles on the Great Siege monument, how does it follow that he places his own placards on the same monument? But this was never about the monument. If Gafà cared so much about Sciortino’s sculpture, then he would have removed our calls for justice and stopped at that, not added his own messages of hate.

Of course, his actions are just another pathetic excuse to vilify a murdered journalist who, naturally, has no right of reply. Another ‘suldat tal-azzar’, attacking a dead person who cannot respond to his false claims. His argument, such as it is, is that people deserve to know “who Daphne really was”. This suggests that he believes that her being blown up was justified and that justice is not deserved.

A threatening post

And, as if his own blog and social media pages are not enough for him to propagate his narrative, he chooses to post on our socials, as per his comments on April 27, 2025. Naturally, we remove them. 

Ultimately, Gafà’s actions amount to nothing better than the continued harassment towards the Caruana Galizia family. After all, it was Gafà who stalked and harassed Caruana Galizia on the eve of her assassination. Now he insists on extending this behaviour towards her loved ones and to us, publishing our photos on his blog and on social media, asking his followers to share posts to make us targets of hate. His campaign works. Hateful comments have increased exponentially since Gafà began his ‘memorial’ campaign.

Two recent examples, one naming and threatening Ann Demarco directly, were posted on April 27.

A recent threatening post.

This is just a taster of the multiple, daily comments that we have to put up with. It is a well-known fact that online abuse and harassment can lead to offline violence.

Some might argue that we could ignore his comments and actions but we, the women of #OccupyJustice, stand up to bullies because this is what this is, bullying by an individual who judges us by his ambitions. Unlike him, we neither seek cushy political jobs, nor do we aspire to have them.

Finally, we would like to reiterate that the protest memorial is not a ‘shrine’ and that its positioning has significance. It is a reminder that, more than seven and a half years after the assassination, justice has not been served.

It is not a shrine because Caruana Galizia is not a religious saint or figure of worship, even if those who label us as “extremists” would like to brainwash the public at large into believing that we are some kind of cult.

The protest memorial is a painful reminder that Caruana Galizia is a victim of organised crime, assassinated for exposing hard truths that were inconvenient to criminals who wanted to remain in the shadows.