George Vella and the IVF bill he won’t sign: a symbol of principled conscience? Almost 60 per cent of online readers agree, according to this newspaper’s online poll, a sentiment echoed on other platforms.
Or is the president yet another public figure who wants to have his cake and eat it? The constitutional experts consulted by the Times of Malta think so. They say he’s breaching the constitution every day that he doesn’t sign the bill. If his conscience can’t be reconciled with the law, the constitution says he should resign. Wanting cake says little about conscience and a lot about a sweet tooth for high office.
This disagreement of interpretation is about not the bare facts but what they amount to. Vella made it clear that the bill would be signed, presumably by the acting president, when Vella is abroad.
Vella has refused to answer questions about whether he objects to the law. However, in one interview he suggested that, generally speaking, conscientious objections aren’t all of equal importance. Only some are radical enough to warrant resignation.
Vella implies there’s a class of conscientious objection which you can register without resignation. That’s not in the constitution.
His solution: the delay. The problem: the constitution says that laws must be signed without delay.
Here’s why disagreement arises about the bare facts. The people supporting Vella are focused on his principles regarding genetic selection. For them, what matters is the rights and wrongs of this particular law.
Meanwhile, Vella’s critics are focused on his lack of principle regarding the constitution. His personal solution is unconstitutional. It substitutes what the constitution actually says with Vella’s personal judgement about which delay matters, and which doesn’t.
The critics aren’t castigating Vella because he’s bound by personal principle but because he’s unravelling what the constitution binds him to- Ranier Fsadni
The critics aren’t objecting to the president’s ethical beliefs but rather to his political disbelief: that the plain language of the constitution is binding. It allows no wiggle room for personal judgement.
The critics aren’t castigating Vella because he’s bound by personal principle but because he’s unravelling what the constitution binds him to.
As president he’s there to oversee the constitutional sanctity of the legal process. The moment a president can interfere in the speed of the process, he’s no longer an umpire; he’s a player. And he’s playing in defiance of the law.
It didn’t have to come to this. Vella is not the first president to have had conscientious apprehensions about a bill. Although the constitution allows only for resignation when presidents fundamentally object to a law, there has long been an informal alternative operating before a law is passed.
When Eddie Fenech Adami (2004-09) thought Lawrence Gonzi’s government was inclined to propose a bill he’d have a conscientious objection to – and, being Eddie, that meant he’d resign rather than sign it – he let his objections be privately known and the message reached its intended destination. The government delayed that bill by a few years, until a new president was installed.
It’s public knowledge that George Abela (2009-14) had a fundamental objection to the Civil Unions Bill steered by Joseph Muscat’s government in 2014. Abela informed Muscat before the bill’s third, final reading. Less than a month remained till the end of Abela’s term, so Muscat delayed passing the law until Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca took office.
At the time, much of the commentariat was up in arms, suggesting Abela should have resigned and that he had caused a constitutional crisis. Nonsense.
Abela, like Fenech Adami, did the decent thing. He notified the prime minister that he’d resign if the law proceeded. A potential presidential resignation is absolutely something a prime minister should know about. If it happens, it derails the government’s agenda. There’s no constitutional crisis (a resignation is smoothly handled by the constitution). But it could cause a political crisis for the party in government, if the resignation divides its electoral base.
In both cases, there was a delay, but it was not caused by either president. It was a decision, based on political calculation, made by two prime ministers. Strictly speaking, no law was delayed, in constitutional terms, because there was no law to sign. If you object to those delays, blame the politicians, who were free to proceed and face the consequences.
How different is Vella’s behaviour. Here, a law has been passed. And the constitution is being defied by the very figure who’s supposed to see that it’s respected.
It makes all the difference. The critics were wrong about then president Abela; they’re right about Vella.
It doesn’t matter if the law is signed by the time this column appears. The issue is not about whether today’s delay, in practice, is as long as the delay that arose in 2014.
Abela didn’t ignore the constitution. Vella has. It’s a huge difference. It sets a dangerous precedent. If one head of state can place himself above the law, even if it’s by an inch, what’s to prevent another, by a foot?
Opponents of this IVF law have nothing to celebrate. They have no guarantees that this precedent won’t be used, by some future head of state, to delay a law they very much want – perhaps, on the eve of a general election that ends up changing the composition of parliament and killing off the bill.
In arrogating to himself the power to decide what delay matters and what doesn’t, Vella has opened the way to future, potentially more abusive, arbitrariness.
Vella usurped power the constitution doesn’t give him. I doubt that’s what he meant to do. But it’s what he’s done.