The Constitution may be the solution to threats to freedom of speech by foreign firms, lawyer and university lecturer Antonio Ghio told a conference about media and security this morning.
Addressing a conference organised by MEP Roberta Metsola, Dr Ghio referred to letters by foreign law firms that recently tried to shut up media houses from reporting what they believe the public should know.
Earlier this month, Times of Malta editors said they amended some online content after acting on legal advice on “a serious threat to freedom of the press and to the very existence of our organisation.”
Dr Ghio said these were known as Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation, and sadly some media houses looked at the expensive letterheads and bowed their heads.
This was a threat to freedom of speech, and a solution could lie in the Constitution, he said.
The Maltese Constitution did not recognise the death penalty and if a foreign jurisdiction requested the extradition of an individual to a country where this was recognised, the individual would be protected.
"We should actively consider a situation where our constitution also recognised that freedom of speech applied both offline and online, and that these rights were attached not only to natural but also to legal people," he noted.
In his address, Dr Ghio also noted that the law often trailed behind technological development that empowered everyone to actively participate in the current knowledge revolution.
He referred to the Media and Defamation Bill drafted during the previous legislature, which he said would have put Malta at par with media laws in Russia, China and North Korea, by handing the state the power to know who is participating in online citizen journalism.
This unfortunately reflected the inability of elected representatives to understand this technological revolution, he said, adding he was glad that the renewed draft excluded the obligation to register news websites.
Dr Ghio was speaking at a conference called The Fourth Estate in a New World: Citizen Journalism and Security Challenges.
The event is one in a series of annual conferences that the Nationalist MEP organises to discuss current issues and link local and European developments.
Earlier, Dr Metsola noted that Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination last month made the conference’s topic all the more sombre and urgent.
The execution “shone a light on media freedom in Malta, raising fundamental questions as to how safe a critical press corps was in today’s Malta and whether her killing was also a warning to the rest of Malta’s media,” she said.
Another speaker, columnist and blogger for Times of Malta Petra Caruana Dingli, reiterated that when the slain journalist was silenced, so was the rest of society.
Her blog had been a space for others to voice their opinion and several were bearing the brunt of this gap, Dr Caruana Dingli said, adding that some had actually attempted to fill this gap.
Dr Caruana Dingli, who was also a close friend of Ms Caruana Galizia, insisted that while mainstream media remained important in providing facts and objectivity, so did blogs, social media, and citizen journalism, because they all told part of the story.