I firstly want to put on record my utmost respect for my friend and rule-of-law maestro Prof Kevin Aquilina.

Secondly, my equally profound disagreement with his take on the powers of the president in exercising the prerogative of mercy.

I cannot accept an interpretation of our supreme law that pulls inside out the very clear wording of the text, to make it mean, not something different, but the exact opposite of what the sacred text clearly asserts.

Presidential pardons? Naaah, that means that pardons are not presidential at all.

“The President shall have the power to pardon” signifies that… the president does not have the power to pardon. “Shall have the power” only means that she has the obligation to say yes to whatever politicians order her to do. And “Presidential Prerogative” means, you guessed it, presidential subservience to the commands of others.

Silly me, to believe that the constitution has only to be interpreted in a way that promotes its fundamental values – the separation of powers and the rule of law.

The separation of powers dictates that criminal prosecutions, determinations and sentencing shall be the preserve of the judiciary and that only, most extraordinarily, shall another authority (the president) have a say if, exceptionally, she feels she has to underwrite some clemency.

The opposite interpretation would be the most lethal attack on the separation of powers I have ever come across.

It means that, henceforth, every criminal prosecution, every determination of guilt and every criminal penalty are entirely in the hands of transient politicians who can meddle with and paralyse each and every prosecution, pervert and nullify each and every judgment of the independent and impartial criminal courts.

Can you even start to realise the catastrophic consequences of this naïve ‘interpretation’?

The constitution expressly delegated this prerogative of mercy exclusively to the personal deliberate judgement of the president whose office is constitutionally guaranteed. She can only be censured or removed from office by a two-thirds majority vote in the House. She has all the legal power and the moral authority to tell the politicians where to get off. That is the reason why the constitution entrusted the delicate prerogative of mercy exclusively to her.

The opposite interpretation also makes a mockery of the rule of law. A basic, necessary requirement of the rule of law dictates that reasons must be given for the exercise of any judicial power. But, wait, a consortium of politicians claims it can decide to paralyse any prosecution, tamper with and nullify any final judgment of the criminal courts without giving any reason whatsoever.

They have made themselves the ultimate court of criminal appeal but without any obligation to give a single reason why they meddle with the course of justice. Is that the abyss we really want our supreme law to preach?

I must disagree emphatically with Aquilina that when the president is presented with a measure she disagrees with, her only course of action is to resign or to absent herself. Where does the constitution even remotely hint at that?

The president has all the legal power and the moral authority to tell the politicians where to get off- Giovanni Bonello

Our supreme law, on the contrary, cannot be clearer: if the politicians deem the president’s refusal to sign amounts to ‘misbehaviour’, they are free to remove her from office – with a two-thirds majority vote.

That is the one and only hold the cabinet or parliament has on the president. All the talk of resignation or absconding abroad is uninformed hot air and scare tactics.

To regulate the prerogative of mercy, every different state has its own constitutional conventions, each of which evolved autonomously over the centuries. Britain, France, Italy, etc. have their own, each one different from the other.

Malta too has its own – cast in stone over centuries of use: the prerogative is exercised personally by the head of state in her own deliberate judgement.

The grand masters always did that; after them, the British governors invariably and officially acted likewise through Royal Instructions. Article 93 of the constitution only repeated this inveterate constitutional convention. Saying that the British lately started doing it differently may be intriguing but is nothing more than irrelevant neocolonial nostalgia hardly becoming after 60 years of independence.

The constitution regulates the presidency in two different and autonomous articles: 85 and 93. Article 85 deals with the ‘functions’ of the president – those she exercises with the consent of the cabinet and those she exercises personally in her own deliberate judgement.

Then the constitution moves on from the president’s ‘functions’ to something entirely different: the president’s ‘prerogative’ (article 93) and the rule is: “The President shall have the power to pardon.” But I forgot. “Shall have the power to pardon” actually means “shall not have the power to pardon”.

No cabinet or politician is mentioned.

It is a highly unfortunate interpretation exercise to attempt to understand the prerogative of mercy though an article that has nothing to do with the prerogative of mercy and to ignore deliberately the clear dictates of the article specifically willed by the constitution to regulate the prerogative of mercy – the president shall have the power to pardon.

I see the president as the personification and the head of my state. It is not my fault if others see her as a futile and hollow robot.

Giovanni Bonello is a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights.