The politics of leakages

I wonder what would have happened in Malta if we experienced the same circumstances as those in Britain, which saw the arrest of the opposition Immigration spokesman Damian Green, whose home, constituency and parliamentary offices were raided by police at the same time of his arrest.

Comparisons with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and with the Stasi secret police in East Germany before the wall went down - both made in the British press - would be expected; and rightly so. The reaction to Austin Gatt's recent accusations that led to an investigation of a Central Bank employee accused of consorting with the opposition would pale into insignificance when compared with such a sordid affair.

Although parliamentary privilege in both Britain and Malta applies only to what is said in Parliament and does not give MPs or their offices - whether in the precincts of the House or elsewhere - any special protection from the law or from police investigation, it is also true that obtaining and disclosing leaked documents is a normal part of the job of every opposition MP in a democracy.

When I was an opposition MP between 1976 and 1987, leaks were the order of the day. When I was appointed minister, one of the first things I told my staff was to assume at all times that documents in official files will always somehow find a way into the public domain and that assuming there was such a thing as 'secret documents' would be foolhardy. If leaks to the opposition were rife under the Mintoff/KMB regime, I could not fathom any reason why they could be avoided simply because there was a change of government.

A report a week ago in London's The Sunday Times highlighted the absurdity of any democratic government attempting to stop leaks. The report's title says it all: 'Plan to stop ID card leaks is... leaked.' Clearly the rash action of the British police did not lead to further leaks being staunched by the fear of persecution.

Leaks to politicians or to journalists are part of the political milieu in any democratic country. Gordon Brown himself is said to have made his reputation exploiting government leaks when in opposition. The British government's attempt to invoke the security of the state to justify the way the police clumsily rode roughshod over everybody during the course of their investigations, does not hold any water. Incidentally, this shows that the police are the same everywhere and that without the eternal vigilance of the press and politicians, they will always overplay their hand.

Had something similar happened in Malta, I am sure that there would also have been those who react by clamouring for the need of a Whistleblower Protection Act.

In the UK, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 provides a framework of legal protection for individuals who disclose information so as to expose malpractice and matters of similar concern. But this does not protect the civil servant who was allegedly responsible for the leak of Home Office documents about immigration policy. The leaked documents did not expose any malpractice but exposed the deceit and inadequacy of the British government's immigration policy. In other words, the issue was a political one.

There is also such a thing as the Official Secrets Act and the British MP was investigated on suspicion of 'conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office'. The MP was allegedly 'grooming' a civil servant to break the law - a veritable crime if there ever was one!

The episode shows that laws to protect so-called 'whistleblowers' do not give a free rein to whoever wants to spill the beans, as those who insist for such a law in Malta seem to think.

In the run-up to the general election last March, then opposition leader Alfred Sant promised that one of the first laws a new Labour government would enact would be a Whistleblower Act, adding that his party wanted this law in place because it would be a government with zero tolerance of corruption or incompetence.

Corruption is of a criminal nature and no one can argue against facilitating its exposure, but revealing alleged 'incompetence' is something else. Incompetence is a subjective opinion and whether it exists or not is in the realm of politics and not of the criminal courts.

Frankly, I always thought that 'whistleblower protection' in Malta would do more harm than good. With our Mediterranean penchant for abusing whatever can be abused, which is practically everything, I am sure that such legal protection would be the perfect tool for a civil servant to threaten their superiors on higher rungs of the civil service ladder or even the political masters themselves.

Leaks are part of the democratic game and rather than over-reacting, as the British government seems to have done by asking for a police investigation that then went haywire, any government worth its salt should simply take them in its stride.

micfal@maltanet.net