Beware of allowing the police to detain people for days on end without charging them with a crime, Opposition MPs warned parliament on Monday.
Nationalist MPs Carm Mifsud Bonnici and Mario de Marco both spoke of concern about a proposal to triple the maximum period of pre-trial arrest.
“Let’s not be fooled and pretend that this sort of power will only be used in exceptional cases. If the police get this power, they will use it whenever they can,” Mifsud Bonnici said.
“Hardened criminals and delinquents will not be affected by these changes. They will just remain silent. It is the innocent people who end up arrested that I am worried about,” Mifsud Bonnici told parliament.
Mifsud Bonnici, who served as Home Affairs Minister between 2008 and 2012, warned that prolonged periods of police detention increased the likelihood of people providing false confessions.
“It is important that we do not end up in the situation we faced years ago when people were detained without charge for long periods of time,” he said.
“These sorts of amendments are a temptation for (the police to carry out) shortcut investigations.”
Police can currently hold a person under arrest for 48 hours before charging him or her with a crime. The proposal being debated in parliament seeks to extend that period by an additional 84 hours, subject to a magistrate’s approval.
According to the government proposal, time extensions would only be available if the suspect is believed to have committed a crime that is subject to a jail sentence exceeding 12 years.
If approved, the change would allow the police to hold criminal suspects for up to five-and-a-half days before charging them with a crime.
The proposal stems from concerns among investigators that the existing 48-hour limit is insufficient when probing major crimes or criminal suspects. In such cases, interrogations or results of forensic tests can take longer than the maximum 48-hour period.
PN MP Mario de Marco believes the extension period proposed is “too extensive” – a concern raised by his colleague and fellow lawyer Joe Giglio last week – and asked how the government had decided on an 84-hour extension period.
De Marco recalled how police in the 1970s and early 1980s often abused of their powers by releasing criminal suspects after 48 hours and rearresting them moments later. He did not want any return to that state of affairs, he said.
The PN MP also noted some concerns with the vague wording in the Bill.
Justice Minister Jonathan Attard, who tabled the proposed amendments, said some of those queries were valid and promised to revise the Bill to better clarify specific issues.
The minister was however more dismissive of De Marco’s calls for more discussion before taking any decisions.
Talk about this sort of amendment dates back years, he noted. In 2017, the Opposition wanted to combine this sort of change with other amendments. And in 2021, it included a similar proposal in an “omnibus bill” that combined various anti-corruption proposals.
The omnibus bill which the minister referred to was presented by then-PN MP Jason Azzopardi, who had pushed parliament to amend the law to extend the 48-hour pre-trial arrest period.
The minister insisted that the extended period would be “the exception, not the rule,” and was especially needed to prevent criminal suspects from fleeing the country or intimidating witnesses.
To ignore these realities “is to live in a parallel universe,” the minister argued.