Parliament's Standards Commissioner wants to be given the power to publish decisions not to investigate complaints, saying that would help prevent  "selective, wrong or deceitful" interpretations of such decisions. 

The request made to Speaker Anġlu Farrugia was brought to public attention on Friday, when Commissioner Joseph Azzopardi's office published his letter to Farrugia. 

It comes weeks after MP Rosianne Cutajar had publicly claimed that a standards commission probe into her income as an Institute of Tourism Studies consultant had vindicated her. 

The complainant, NGO Repubblika, had subsequently released the commissioner's report in full. It revealed that the probe could not go ahead on a technicality, as the complaint was time-barred. 

In his letter, the commissioner urged the Speaker to press parliament's Public Accounts Committee to allow his office to make such decisions public. 

Currently, the office publishes reports concerning completed investigations but does not do so when a complaint ends with a decision to not investigate. 

In such cases, only the subject of the complaint and the person who filed it receive a copy of the report. 

In his letter, Azzopardi noted that he had written to the Speaker in June to propose allowing his office to publish such decisions when it believed that it was justified and not detrimental to the subject of the complaint. 

The commissioner noted that in many cases the allegations that a complaint focused on were already in the public domain. 

The commissioner's decision not to investigate would then often be made public either by the complainant or the person subject to the complaint. 

The office said situations where decisions it took were published unofficially should be avoided, particularly because the publisher could be selective, wrong or deceitful.

This, the office said, had happened in a recent case. It did not specify which.

It said that, for the sake of more transparency, the office wanted:

• To have the power to publish decisions that a complaint should not be investigated;
• To upload such decisions, under normal circumstances, to the commission's website.
• To have the power to issue statements to the media or directly distribute decisions to the media in exceptional cases, to avoid wrong interpretations of its decisions;
• To have the discretion to not publish decisions that a complaint should not be investigated, if it believed that was right in the circumstances, such as when the allegations would not have been already public.