You intuitively know they’re lying when they claim they’re altering the law regarding citizens’ access to magistrate’s inquiries to prevent abuse. You might feel that Jason Azzopardi’s persistence can be a bit irritating at times. However, no one has ever suggested that we should eliminate doctors’ clinics due to the occasional hypochondriac with an abundance of time on their hands.
Over the past decade, the courts have dealt with approximately 8,000 inquiries. According to the prime minister’s count, only 25 of these originated from private petitions. By our estimation, merely around 11 came from the “PN extremists who misused the court system”. The courts are far from being overwhelmed by our militant enthusiasm. Nothing in this can reasonably be described as “abuse of justice”.
However, individual petitions to magistrates have proven significant in cases where the police – beholden to the ruling Labour Party – refused to act. They are why the ill-fated privatisation of public hospitals is now subject to criminal prosecution. They are why the bribes offered and received surrounding energy procurement are also the subject of criminal prosecution.
These cases involve the usual suspects – Joseph Muscat’s gang – who believed they could evade repercussions for their crimes by treating corrupt officers to football trips abroad, treating them to meals and generally securing their career prospects. They did not consider the magistrates and some “extremists” who discovered a means to ensure they would not escape justice.
In the Electrogas case, we lived for nine years with the frustration of knowing what happened (thanks to brave press reporting) and seeing the state refuse or fail to act.
Don’t think for a minute that this is just about corruption. Ministers can do worse than pocket bribes. Consider the recent ombudsman report that confirmed what this newspaper and others have long reported: Alexander Dalli – one of the best-paid officials of your government – operated the prisons like a gulag, inflicting degrading and inhuman treatment on people in his trust. The ombudsman identified the crimes the prison management under Dalli is likely to have breached.
The police knew about all this for years. The police refused to act on these vile, violent crimes, these grotesque violations of rights, these criminal excesses and abuse of administrative and political power. Because bent cops in the thrall of the government will not investigate someone the prime minister is so keen to protect.
I’m not going to go technical because I’m not qualified to give you a technical opinion. But you need to understand that, though they’re leaving in the law a rump procedure for citizens to petition for an inquiry, they’ve done it in a way that is simply impossible to use. If you’re interested, read the explainer in Repubblika’s study of the new law on repubblika.org/bill125.
The how is complicated but the why is easy to see. Robert Abela and his ministers expect they have a right to impunity for themselves and their unlawful associates. They are protecting themselves from any consequence for wrongdoing. They are also finding ways to strengthen the poor legal arguments Muscat is using in court to avoid any outcome in the prosecution he is currently undergoing by enacting the pretended rights that Muscat is falsely claiming were violated in his case.
Individual petitions to magistrates are why the ill-fated privatisation of public hospitals is now subject to criminal prosecution- Manuel Delia
They also criminalise citizen engagement against corruption by imposing draconian penalties for daring to report a crime they wish to overlook. If an inquiry is conducted at the request of a private citizen and if sufficient evidence is discovered to persuade the prosecutor to issue charges but a conviction is not secured by the end of the proceedings for any reason, the state will turn against the individual who made the initial report and fine them the equivalent of the full cost of the inquiry.
If this law were applied to the VGH scandal, and for whatever reason the prosecution failed to secure Muscat’s conviction, this author and four other activist colleagues would face a criminal penalty of €11 million, exceeding any financial punishment possible for any crime under our laws. We would have to pay more than any fraudster, any bigamist or any drug trafficker would ever likely be forced to pay.
I’m not asking you to sympathise. After all, up to now, you might think this law only ensures that politicians get away with crimes. Don’t they always do that anyway? Why should you start carting now?
This is what you need to understand. To weaken the state’s ability to prosecute corruption, they undermine its ability to prosecute any serious crime because they’re changing the law to cover all inquiries (not just the ones started by individual petitions).
They are forcing magistrates to work with experts the government chooses for them. Magistrates will only be allowed to pay Malta market rates for experts, so they’ll need to hire locals even when investigating cross-border bank fraud and money laundering by organised crime. Experts who work for or through companies (to manage the risk of being hounded by perpetrators) will be excluded, which means the courts won’t be able to gather and analyse evidence of complex financial crime.
Here’s a nice one. To enshrine Muscat’s false complaint that he wasn’t allowed to speak to the inquiring magistrate, from this point onwards your typical garden-variety drug lord will have the right to barge into the office of an inquiring magistrate and confront them, accompanied by their army of lawyers, before the magistrate has had the chance to gather any evidence to build a case against that drug lord.
No, wait. That’s not the worst bit. Lawyers for the drug lord will now be able to cross-examine witnesses before an inquiry commences and any evidence has been collected.
No wonder lawyers defending criminals are ubiquitous on national television, expressing their excitement about the new law. They assert that “innocent individuals” – the term they use for their drug-trafficking clients – will no longer be persecuted by our courts.
Those lawyers are not speaking for you, the truly innocent person here. You’re going to have to speak for yourself. Join us on Sunday, February 16 at 4 pm in Valletta, and even if you know they’re going to do what they want, do yourself the favour of not letting them think you’re too compliant to object.