Other people will assess the state of our economy, the health of our environment, the inequalities of our society. They’ll find them uncertain, degraded and widened. There are fires to attend to, crises to manage, perhaps more urgent distractions from the state of the rule of law in this country, such as it is.
Perhaps just this once, on the last day of the year, let us look at our report card.
The European Commission’s 2023 report was scathing enough. It found we had ignored most of the commission’s “recommendations” to us from the year before. I put the word recommendations between quotes advisedly.
Malta was told that when the top job in the judiciary becomes vacant, judges should be involved in the choice of their new boss. We ignored that advice. We were told that TVM and its sister stations should be run independently of government control. We ignored that one too. We were told there should be an independent agency to protect victims of human rights. We didn’t do that either.
Those were 2022 recommendations ignored in 2023. When they look at things in 2024, they’ll find we’ve still done bugger all.
Yet, in their report this year, they found some cause for optimism. The commission was delighted to note Malta was not such a hopeless case at all.
They noted “some progress” in implementing recommendations for a more efficient justice system. This is where the government’s desktop presentations come in handy. They announce plans to do this and to change that, impressive shifts of army divisions and tank battalions that exist only on the map.
Whatever progress was made in the effort to improve the efficiency of the justice system, it has yielded no measurable or even merely perceptible results. No one thinks they’re getting court rulings faster. Judges and magistrates have described the situation as “on the brink of collapse”. Not comforting at all.
The commission was pleased that Malta made “some progress” in reducing the time it takes to investigate high-level corruption. I can’t be sure what the Maltese authorities told them to convince them of that. Perhaps not as impressed as the Maltese government might have hoped them to be, the commission still complained that, by 2023, Malta had not managed to close any significant corruption case. They’ll say the same in 2024.
The commission was elated to see that, at last, in 2023, six years after it allowed Daphne Caruana Galizia to be killed, the Maltese State was making “some progress” in improving legal safeguards to protect journalists. They had in mind the draft laws the government published in 2022. The draft laws were junk to begin with. And they remain just that, a draft. In 2024, the commission will withdraw its applause.
The 2024 rule of law scoresheet will look depressingly similar to the one we got in 2023. No progress in involving judges in the choice of their boss. No improvements to the efficiency of the justice system. No record of convictions in high-level corruption. No bolstered safeguards for journalists. No new rules to make public broadcasting independent of the government. And no new independent human rights agency.
The commission added another recommendation in 2023. They said Malta should have a framework for public participation in the legislative process. This is not some new revolutionary norm, some exciting development in the world history of political philosophy, some fresh discovery of a latter-day Montesquieu. It’s just what you’d expect in a normal democracy.
The European Commission still complained that, by 2023, Malta had not managed to close any significant corruption case
In 2023, the European Commission realised at last that, despite the Maltese authorities’ claims to the contrary, new laws in Malta are conceived, gestated and accouched on the minister’s desk. It’s all done by parthenogenesis. We all wake up one morning hoping for an uneventful day only to be hit by news that spreads from the lips of someone who accidentally stumbled on a copy of the government gazette. There they found some new law, as yet undiscussed and often unexpected, drawn up with no consultation but changing our lives merely because it bears the minister’s signature.
Or, when needs must, we are forewarned by what is euphemistically termed as the ‘first reading’ of a new law in parliament, which is no more than the announcement of a title of an as yet unseen new law, often vague, never accompanied by any detail, let alone an invitation to review it.
When the government is determined to rush a law through, the time between the law’s first publication in draft form and its final adoption by the president’s signature is less than it would take most people to prepare a birthday party. The commission said this was not on.
We should have long since evolved from the times of Otto von Bismarck who advised people should not be allowed to see the manufacture of two things: sausages and laws and both because the process might cause the uninitiated permanent indigestion.
In 2024, they’ll dutifully report we’ve ignored the recommendation for systemic consultation when new laws are written as well.
The Maltese authorities know that any European threats of consequences for their stubborn recidivism are likely to prove hollow. The Hungarian regime has nearly completed the disassembly of democracy and any threats that it might be excluded from the financial benefits of EU membership as a result have had to be shelved in order to keep Hungary on side or, at best, neutral while the EU tries to keep up with the Ukrainian emergency. If Viktor Orban can get away with what he does, who’s going to stop Malta from guaranteeing the perpetual impunity of its corrupt politicians?
There’s a lesson from Poland to be learnt. We can wait forever for the commission to punish the intransigence of the Muscat/Abela regime but we’re never likely to get any joy from the wait. While we still have elections, we can demand and force change. We need to or, at this rate, we won’t have any meaningful elections anymore.
It’s fair to worry about the economy, to get worked up about the environment and to lament social inequalities.
If we allow the rule of law to collapse, we’ll abandon all means to begin fixing any of those things.