Roamer's column

Going through the Annual Report of the Office of the Commissioner for Children (OCC) for 2006 presented by Sonia Camilleri, its first Commissioner, I was deeply impressed by the sheer volume of work that has been carried out since the organisation was set up, on a shoestring, in 2003. In this case the shoestring consisted of the Commissioner herself, an office minus many amenities and a permanent staff of one, perhaps two. Mrs Camilleri resigned earlier this year.

Starting anything from scratch presents a challenge; setting this one up and running it must have been a formidable undertaking. Given the daunting mission of the Office, financial and human resources were severely limited. Its budget was raised to Lm25,000 in 2006, still too small a sum. A large percentage of it goes into payments for a full-time manager (research and policy), a full-time office secretary, a part-time legal consultant on children's rights and until recently for the Commissioner herself, who was working, I understand, on a part-time basis.

That Mrs Camilleri managed to meet the challenge successfully says a lot about her, not least her determination to highlight children's issues, encourage legislation in their favour, stress the urgent requirement for all manner of services that children need and to promote them as our "future" with the seriousness this objective deserves.

In her message, the Commissioner makes the faultless assertion that we can only do justice with our children if we address their needs now, fulfil their dreams now, listen to them now, play with them now, show them that we love them now. Some may regard this as so much cliché, but cliché does not lessen the significance of acts that parents are called upon to perform and the need for governments and institutions to help parents (not replace them) in their vocation.

As to what has been accomplished and/or attempted, a glance through the 56-page report (112 in both languages) says it all. The Commissioner understood, and was correct to do so, the importance of public relations. More important than recognition of communications (she participated in 39 radio and television programmes to speak about children's rights) was her adoption of these as a priority to project the office and create greater awareness of children's rights.

Among these she highlighted the need for quality children's programmes in the broadcasting media and the need to introduce a rehabilitation programme for children and young people with 'very challenging behaviour'. A national conference was held on both.

A potential child is a child

Perhaps most significantly, her achievements lay in the fact that she brought such a breadth of concerns to the notice of legislators. These ranged from the children's right to play to a detailed contribution to make the Internet safer for children (the Commissioner's Office is represented on the National e-Security working group set up by Government).

Following up that right to play involved a survey to see how local councils were equipped to implement this right (taken from Article 31 in the UN Convention and the Right to Play), meeting up with the president of the Malta Playing Fields Association, establishing relations with the Malta Sports Council which also agreed to allow children to use the Cottonera Sports Complex on designated days.

The office also addressed concerns about too great an emphasis on examination achievement and too little on "leisure, cultural, artistic and recreational activities" (the majority of primary schoolchildren have only one P.E. lesson a week - education, sports, youth ministers, take note).

Mrs Camilleri included in her definition of 'child' an ethical responsibility for a child's potentiality in the womb. So she followed the testimonies presented before the social affairs committee of the House on the use of biotechnology in assisted reproduction assiduously. She argued in favour of legislation to regulate the process (how absurd that this legislation is still not in place and how unethical).

Last September she expressed the opinion that the conclusions of the Bioethics Consultative Committee indicated "some very positive elements when looked at from the point of view of the protagonist, the child." She praised the committee for its recommendations in the matter of surrogacy and donor schemes and its suggestion that implantation be limited to two, preferably one, embryo at every IVF attempt.

"These recommendations," she was reported as saying at the time, "if adopted by the legislator, would avert the traumas in children of unknown or 'additional' fathers and mothers and prevent artificially created high-risk multiple pregnancies"; an impeccable ethical statement. She was recently criticised for asking why an Act that regulates those who "tamper with life at its early stages" does not exist?

The question unfairly earned her the label of bigotry, though why this sobriquet was flung in her direction remains unclear. Legislation and regulation on the matter, in some cases lax to a fault, exist in every Western country where in vitro fertilisation has been practised for 25 years. The alternative to both can only lead to ethical, never mind moral, anarchy. It was characteristic of her to call a spade by its name and to express the fear that a lacuna continues to exist.

Mrs Camilleri's was a tough job. Perhaps her sense of commitment to her brief made it tougher. She never turned a blind eye and was zealous in her attempts to make the post as independent of Government as possible. And she felt strongly enough about the slow pace in arriving at what she felt needed to be done now, lack of resources and other factors to make them matters for resignation. I wish she had not taken this step but, agree with her decision or not, I am certain she did so reluctantly and gave the matter conscientious thought.

Property please, we're foreign

It worries me a little bit when I read that 2007 will be a good year for the property market. Has there been a year since 1987 when it has not been a good year? Nor am I over the moon that there is a growing demand for local property by foreign buyers.

We are not given specifics about the growth rate in demand and would have thought that a statistic or two to establish what the trend has been, in some form of official figures, could provide us with a useful indicator. Is it enough to push prices even higher?

Meanwhile we are being seduced, well, that's not quite correct; the moneyed class with a few tens of thousands stashed away doing nothing except wait for their transformation into the euro currency is being seduced by the possibility of owning property in Bulgaria or somewhere. Mistaking me for a member of that class, somebody e-mailed me to ask whether I wished to purchase property in Costa Rica and, if affirmative, would I like to download a sheaf of documents about the place? To which the answer, in both cases, was no.

Back to the Bulgarian Enticement. That the Maltese are picking up property in Sicily is well-known, but this is really a case of taking on some form of residence in Outer-Malta-in-the-Nearer-Sicily, so to speak, a mere two and a half, three hours' journey, for half of which time one is on a Virtù ferry. No offence meant, Sofia.

I suppose the idea of becoming landlords on an European scale might appeal to the well-heeled. How dull Mellieha by comparison, how prosaic Qrendi, and as for the Sliema seafront, how passé. It must appear exotic to own, instead, 300, 400 square metres of real estate on the western edge of the Black Sea, or parked on the south bank of the Danube (it is not blue, by the way), which forms much of the country's northern border with Romania.

Amazing, really, because here we are, a mere 18 years after the Communist dictator Zhivkov was unceremoniously removed, having the country through which Christendom spread eastwards from Constantinople to the Balkans, northwards to Kiev Russia between the eighth and 12th century, dangled before our eyes. As if in a state of hypnotism some are being attracted thither.

In 1989 Bulgaria would not have been touched with a barge-pole. What a difference no Communism makes. The country can be somebody's idea of fun, I suppose, and if anybody is inclined to property ownership there he may as well become home power at a time when the property market is near the bottom of the scale.

So, good luck to our enterprising, daunting wannabe landowners but you won't catch me eastward-bound, nor too far westward for that matter. My world lies here, northwards in a straight line through that dream country, Italy, further north to Germany, Denmark to the left, Sweden to the right, westwards to the Europe that tumbles into the English Channel and the Atlantic, eastwards to the Czech Republic and Austria, the Balkans, Greece and Turkey (the last three still waiting anxiously to be graced by my presence). That is world enough for me, that and being in the centre of the tideless, Shelley-murdering Mediterranean where, this winter if winter it can be called, cloud-bearing rains refuse to deposit their load on to our farms and gardens. 

Postscript

A real estate magazine that came with yesterday's edition of The Times asks readers not to miss "the last chance to purchase a freehold residential property in Bulgaria at pre-EU prices". It also offered Lm12,076,700 worth of property, of which just under Lm2 million worth was located in Gozo. These amounts do not, of course, take into account the entire portfolio held by this estate agency, just its poshest.

But wait. The Lm12 million we are looking at is a just a shade over two per cent of the money in circulation in Malta. The governor of the Central Bank recently put out a figure of Lm500 million sloshing around, averaging Lm1,250 for every man, woman and child on a population figure of 400,000. Remove children and adolescents and I imagine 60 to 70 per cent of women and minimum wage earners and those living only on a pension and you are looking at big money. It sure as hell is not mine.

You don't say

Loved a Reuter's report that had police treating the discovery of the bodies of a man, a woman and a baby in an East London house as "suspicious at present. We retain an open mind regarding the circumstances at this early stage, and the deaths are being regarded as suspicious". Dah!

Readers with brains where brains normally reside cannot help thinking that the bodies of a man, a woman and a child became corpses because (a) surprise, the man, woman and a four-month old baby girl were murdered; or because (b) surprise, surprise, the man murdered the woman and the four-month old baby girl and then killed himself; or because (c) surprise, surprise, surprise, because the woman murdered the man and the four-month old baby girl child and then killed herself and because (d) surprise to the nth, but given the open mindedness of the police we are free to come to this conclusion, the four-month-old girl murdered the man and the woman and then killed herself.

I am sure there is an (e) and (f) somewhere but my deadline approaches and I cannot find either.

Quote...

"I am sitting in the civic hall in Guguletu, a Cape Town township community, in November 1996. A 70-year-old woman has been called to testify before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning the activities of a policeman in her township. It transpired that he had come, one night, with some others and in front of the woman had shot her son at point-blank range. Two years later the same officer had returned to arrest her husband, whom she supposed subsequently to have been executed. Some time later the policeman came yet again. This time he took her to a place where he showed her husband, still alive. But as her spirits lifted, the policeman doused her husband with petrol, set him on fire and killed him.

"As the woman concludes her testimony, the presiding officer addresses her: 'What would you like the outcome of this hearing to be?' After a long pause the woman answers: 'I would like three things. First, I want to be taken to the place where my husband was burned, so I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial. Second, my son and my husband were my only family. Therefore, I want this police officer to become my son, to come twice a month to my home and spend a day with me so I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining inside me. Finally, I want this officer to know that I offer him forgiveness because Jesus Christ died to forgive me. Please would someone lead me across the hall so that I can embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven."

(from Out of the Ashes, cited in an article by Sister Teresa White in The Catholic Herald, February 16).