The Financial Action Task Force placed Malta on its grey list because of significant deficiencies in its fight against money laundering and the funding of terrorism. The UK followed suit for the same reasons, listing the island among high-risk countries.
The lack of good governance and the breakdown in the rule of law contributed in no small way to this outcome. This was laid bare in the findings of the public inquiry into Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination. “The state must shoulder the responsibility for the assassination as it created an atmosphere of impunity generated by the highest levels of the administration within Castille and, like an octopus, spread to other entities like regulatory institutions and the police, leading to a collapse of the rule of law.”
That quote from the report is another way of describing the situation as Caruana Galizia herself saw it just before she was killed: “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”
For impunity to be reined in, and for the law to prevail, the institutions must be strengthened with the resources they need to operate effectively and efficiently. But the situation, in some areas, is still desperate: “If no urgent and immediate action is taken, the situation is bound to further deteriorate, this leading to the eventual collapse of the essential institution responsible for maintaining the rule of law, namely the law courts.”
That was a warning issued this week by the Association of Judges and Magistrates of Malta.
So long as they continue to be denied the resources they need to work properly, they will not be able to fulfil their role in ensuring the rule of law is truly upheld.
Judges and magistrates rarely speak their mind in this way. That they have decided to do so can only mean that the situation is bad, very bad.
A former chief justice had spoken of a different threat to the rule of law just days before Caruana Galizia was killed in late 2017.
Silvio Camilleri had expressed concern that justice could not take its course if the attorney general and the police failed in their duties. If that happened, he cautioned, the edifice of the administration of justice would break down, leaving it in ruins.
What is worrying judges and magistrates now is that “the whole court administration, which is the sole prerogative of the government, is in a very precarious and dire situation”.
They are calling desperately on the government to invest in the justice system.
Their dire warning, however, has been met by loud silence from the highest authorities in the land, that is, the president and the prime minister. The justice ministry only issued a comment through a spokesperson after Times of Malta sought a reaction.
The response was merely more rhetoric. Only last February, the justice minister, who excels in singing his own praises about the justice reforms he says he is pushing, pledged he was determined to work even harder to bring about more reforms and positive results for the country.
The public statement made by the judiciary proves he has not made any inroads – indeed, that he has failed miserably.
It falls upon the president to assure everyone, including the entities monitoring us from beyond these shores, that he will guarantee the final bulwark in the defence of the rule of law – to use the definition of the courts from the former chief justice – will continue to function as expected in a healthy democracy, come what may.