On Saturday, November 4, Parliamentary Secretary for Social Dialogue Andy Ellul summoned the media to a press conference, one that was not in anyone’s diary.

Were it not for the fact that in the greater scheme of things, Ellul is a relatively insignificant minister, one would have thought that a momentous announcement was on the cards. Who knows, the arrest of a member of royalty or the resignation of someone important?

It wouldn’t be this chap to announce this sort of thing, though. In the circumstances, expectations were not high and the presser did not disappoint in this regard.

Whatever Saturday morning activities Ellul tore himself away from were less important to him when compared to the subject of the presser.

Ellul took to the podium to denounce the constitutional case filed by the Union of Professional Educators.

The case concerns a bid to overturn a decision of the Industrial Tribunal that had denied the UPE collective bargaining rights with the ministry of education. Union recognition is a fraught subject and labour law doesn’t really address it satisfactorily – but leave that aside. What got Ellul’s goat was the fact that the union had cited the chair and members of the tribunal that had found against it.

More precisely, I suspect, it was the fact that lawyers Jason Azzopardi and Therese Commodini Cachia had taken up the case that irked Ellul no end and the Labour-leaning media and trollosphere did not hesitate to take up the hint on this aspect.

I will leave it to the Chamber of Advocates to stand up for the principle that advocates taking up a case do so for their client and should not be targeted for that.

It would have been much more constructive for the parliamentary secretary to have addressed the fundamental point with which the case is concerned. It is being asserted that the tribunal was not impartial, due to government-dependent positions held by its members.

The specific case makes specific references but it also brings into sharp focus concerns that have long been felt.

The composition in general of the tribunal had been debated in a case quite a few years ago, filed by the GWU, and some changes had been made but they were, and remain, inadequate.

Practitioners have long been agitating for a new form, involving proper judicial officers but this was emphatically not the point addressed in Ellul’s Saturday morning announcement.

It was the fact that lawyers Jason Azzopardi and Therese Commodini Cachia had taken up the case that irked Andy Ellul no end- Andrew Borg Cardona

Ellul took his cue – exclusively – from the fact that the individual members of the tribunal had been cited in the case, emphasising that it was simply not on that these people should have been targeted. He drew a picture of distraught – almost tearful – individuals petitioning the prime minister and the president in abject terror that they were being sued to within an inch of their very existence.

The UPE, in response, thanked Ellul for highlighting the fact that so impartial (not) was the tribunal that their reaction was to run into the arms of the government for protection. The government, Ellul told us, immediately wrapped them in its warm embrace and promised to pay their legal costs.

Why the state advocate, who defends the interests of the State (and not the government), was not charged with defending the members of the tribunal as a State entity is not clear. Instead, the tribunal members’ privately engaged legal eagles will be paid for by the government.

Ellul, before coming over all shocked at the events to which he was reacting with such urgency on a Saturday morning, would have done well actually to read the constitutional application that had been filed. He would have seen, had he done this little thing, that the individuals concerned were being cited only “for whatever interest they may have”, a mechanism that allows persons not in the direct line of fire to submit their position if they choose so to do.

In fact, in their requests to the court in the event that the case was decided in their favour, the UPE made absolutely no request for any sanction, damages or other measures whatsoever to be given against the individuals concerned, further confirming, if confirmation were needed, that these individuals were involved peripherally, for the sake of completeness, if you like.

That the composition and manner of functioning of the Industrial Tribunal in general needs to be examined in depth is a given, at least among those who care about this sort of thing. Whether the question needed to be raised in this manner is, to be fair, a matter of some debate but, by reacting the way he did, Ellul was of no help at all.

Quite the contrary, in fact.

Andrew Borg Cardona

The impartiality, or otherwise, of the individuals concerned will now come under a harsher spotlight than would have been the case if (faux) emotions were to have been left out. The UPE would not have been given more ammunition and the more important debate about the composition of the tribunal in general would not have been pushed into the background.