A judge presiding over appeal proceedings in respect of two owners of a gentlemen’s club has stressed the need for laws to regulate such places of entertainment in a society that is becoming “increasingly permissive.”
Madam Justice Edwina Grima highlighted the need for such intervention by the government when presiding over the case of Raymond Micallef and Vincent Micallef who had been cleared of running a brothel and of breaching employment regulations.
The two men were acquitted in 2012 but an appeal was filed by the Attorney General.
The case dated back to November 2006 when police raiding a club called Huggins in Paceville came across a number of scantily-dressed Romanian girls chatting with male customers at the bar, while two others were performing a pole and lap dance respectively.
The court was told that during the raid the police had found nothing illegal. The prosecution had not summoned either the girls or the customers as witnesses.
Madam Justice Grima observed that although gentlemen’s clubs have mushroomed, and in spite of a consultation plan to regulate such outlets, the state had so far promulgated no legislation in this regard.
The time was ripe for such clubs to be regulated by ‘ad hoc’ legislation, as part of a framework regulating the management of such premises and laying down limits to the activities carried out there.
Unfortunately, the prosecution wrongly referred to laws on prostitution and brothels when such gentlemen’s clubs were neither brothels nor ‘half-way houses,’ the court observed.
Striptease, pole and lap dancing, though intended to evoke sexual pleasure in a male audience, did not constitute ‘immoral acts’ falling under the definition of prostitution, when performed inside such clubs by women who did so out of their own free will so as to earn money.
The court further observed that the workers in such clubs often came to Malta from Eastern European countries, still reeling from the negative effects of communism. They ended up exploited and pressured into this trade, enticing customers to pay a ‘fee’ for their private dancing.
On the basis of the evidence, the court confirmed the acquittal on the charges of running a brothel, whilst overturning the first court’s decision on employment irregularities, finding the men guilty and fining them each €1500.
Lawyers Franco Debono and Marion Camilleri were defence counsel.