PEN Malta has described a gagging order on the media by the courts on Thursday as “illogical and disturbing”.
The organisation was referring to a ruling by Magistrate Rachel Montebello on an application by Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers seeking action for contempt against a Times of Malta journalist.
Journalist Jacob Borg had reported how a local producer allegedly turned to the businessman, charged with complicity in Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder, for help in the run-up to the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest.
Although the court turned down the request for action for contempt, it stressed there was to be no publication of data from Fenech’s phone and that any such publication would amount to contempt of court.
"A gagging order on matters that do not prejudice the ongoing proceedings against Yorgen Fenech is not justified,” PEN Malta president Immanuel Mifsud said.
He said that while the organisation understood the right of everyone accused of a crime to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise and that it is the duty of the court to protect the accused from prejudice and their right to a fair hearing, it was “disturbed” that the magistrate saw fit to rule Times of Malta’s reporting as “not in the public interest”.
The magistrate, PEN said, had no role in making such a determination.
"PEN Malta calls for the respect of journalistic freedom, not merely in the interest of the people who exercise that profession, but more importantly because of the public’s right to know what journalists find out about wrongdoing in their democracy.
The application of the gagging order, it said, would have meant that past stories sourced from the records of Fenech’s phone conversations, that led to resignations and material consequences in public institutions, would have been kept from the public’s view.
"This would have been manifestly not in the public interest,” it insisted.
"We call upon the courts to ensure that in the exercise of their duty to protect, as they should, the rights of all people accused of crimes, they also recall, at all times, the right of the public to be informed of corruption, collusion and wrongdoing in public institutions."