Every year, around October, the governments of almost 60 countries in the northern hemisphere, the long way from Alaska to Kamchatka, meet in Warsaw to listen to civil society activists speak about challenges to democratic life for ordinary people.
There are many problems well beyond our imagination. Children are being deported en masse out of Ukraine and ‘re-educated’. Political prisoners languish in Azerbaijan and Belarus. And that’s not even mentioning suffering outside the OSCE area, such as around Israel and the broader Middle East.
Maltese NGOs do not habitually attend the yearly OSCE Human Dimensions Conference. They wouldn’t afford the luxury. But, this year, the Maltese government is chairing the meeting, so the absence of Maltese civil society would be noticed even against the background of the more dramatic presence of NGOs from oppressive countries. So, the Maltese government did the unthinkable. It paid for a delegation of Maltese NGOs to be in Warsaw.
I listened here as Malta’s permanent representative to the OSCE, Natasha Meli Daudey, inaugurated proceedings with a disarmingly frank speech. No country is perfect, she acknowledged, starting with our own. We do not feel entitled to wag our fingers at anyone else when, she recalled, Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated seven years ago. Our democracy, too, she confessed, has its dark shadows.
They say that the first step towards solving a problem is admitting you have one. When the Maltese government acknowledges to the governments of some 60 others that it has a problem with its democracy, you’d think it’s showing the will to address that issue. And, yet, after seven years of full-time campaigning in Maltese civil society, the first conversation I had with a Maltese government official about the state of Malta’s democracy was at a meeting in Warsaw.
Otherwise, the doors are shut. It is a terrible enough sign that our democracy is backsliding that a journalist was killed seven years ago. But an even graver indicator of democratic backsliding is that the Maltese authorities have not started a conversation within our community about implementing reforms recommended by an inquiry into her death.
Nor has there been a conversation about implementing recommendations made by OSCE agencies, of which Malta is currently the president. Nor, for that matter, of the Venice Commission, the European Commission, the OECD and other agencies.
It is not just that the Maltese authorities do not recognise civil society as a legitimate stakeholder and interlocutor in the conversation we should have about our democracy. Our government recognises nobody outside itself. A very frustrated chief justice – the head of one of our formal branches of constitutional government – spoke this week about being ignored or undermined by the Maltese authorities when they should instead be listening and acting.
He appealed to “public authorities” to comply with court orders rather than “hamper, defy, or ignore them”. He demanded that the other pillars of democracy (parliament and cabinet, both in absolute control of the prime minister and his team) “afford adequate protection and full respect” of the courts, which means he thinks they are neither protecting nor respecting them.
During the so-called public consultation on changes to media law, the responsible minister dodged the meeting with journalists to go to a coffee morning- Manuel Delia
The chief justice asked that “those who wield power should carefully weigh their words so as not to sow mistrust in the judiciary”. In the year when Robert Abela led the charge against the inquiring magistrate who investigated the Vitals scandal, the chief justice’s remarks are nothing short of an indictment of the constitutional imbalance the Maltese authorities have caused.
The chief justice uses words wielded earlier by heads of other transparency institutions whose job is to keep executive power in check. The ombudsman has complained several times that the authorities will ignore his findings when they do not like them. The commissioner for standards has expressed frustration that the rules are too often used to subvert the declared objective of increased accountability. Journalists are beside themselves fighting pointless battles in court to get the misnomered Freedom of Information Act to get the government to provide information it would rather hide.
Courts, transparency institutions and journalists silently scream in frustration as they are hampered from doing their jobs by a government unwilling to comply with hitherto accepted norms of democratic life. There’s only one reason for the government to behave that way: to protect wrongdoing within its ranks and guarantee the impunity of the perpetrators who have infiltrated it.
Caruana Galizia’s death seven years ago is an intrinsic injustice that demands redress. But it is also an indicator, a symptom, of a widening gap between the legitimate expectations of a democratic society and the isolation of the Maltese authorities from anyone seeking a conversation about how to put our democracy back on track again.
The government has batted down the hatches. During the so-called public consultation on changes to the media law, the responsible minister dodged the meeting with journalists to go to a coffee morning. A ‘forum’ to bring civil society activists and government officials together to discuss ‘open government’ reforms stopped meeting when activists asked ministers to attend so they could speak to decision-makers. It’s been years since advocates for migrant rights have been able to see the face of a minister even as government policy shifts like quicksand.
The absence of a conversation is unsustainable. We must shift gears in our insistence that our government starts talking to us, regardless of how uncomfortable this conversation will be for them. If they can sit through a conference in Warsaw listening to NGOs speak of mass deportations, wrongful imprisonment and other horrible atrocities, surely they can bear us talk to them about migrant rights, media freedom and the prosecution of corrupt politicians.
As part of the events marking seven years of the campaign for justice for Daphne, Repubblika has published an anti-corruption strategy which promotes the notion of a civic alliance against corruption. We have different roles – activists, journalists, transparency institutions, prosecutors, police, parliamentarians, ministers. Still, in a democracy, we all aim to defend integrity against the infiltration of perpetrators and protect our democracy from those who would supplant it.
If more of us sit around the same table and refine our strategic approach to insisting on getting our democracy to function again, if we work together, even the most recalcitrant ministers will eventually have to come to the table. Next Saturday, October 12, Repubblika is hosting a roundtable to discuss its anti-corruption strategy. I can’t promise any ministers will show up but if you join the alliance, they will eventually feel they have to.
Read the strategy and register to join the roundtable by visiting repubblika.org.