Minister claims ‘tacit agreement’ not to introduce right to lawyer

Justice Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici said yesterday there was “tacit agreement” between the government and the opposition in the last legislature not to introduce the right to a lawyer before police interrogation.

A law introducing such right was passed in Parliament in 2002. However, it only came into force eight years later after considerable pressure by Nationalist backbencher Franco Debono in 2010.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici said yesterday the opposition had agreed to such a situation, citing as evidence the fact that there had been no complaint from Labour on the matter.

He was reacting to pressure piled on him by Labour spokesmen earlier in the day when they laid responsibility on him for what they termed as the crisis being faced by the justice system.

The issue hinges on the implications of a Constitutional Court judgment which ruled that a man’s human rights had been breached when he had been interrogated without first being given access to a lawyer.

The judgment proved to be a watershed, which has already seen a man be acquitted of drug trafficking charges because the only evidence available to the police was a statement he released during an interrogation prior to which he was not granted access to a lawyer.

Other challenges have now followed, including one by a convicted murderer on the basis that he had incriminated himself in a statement given in similar circumstances.

Labour MPs José Herrera and Michael Falzon said more criminals were roaming the streets after being freed because of the inadmissibility of their statement given to the police before they could consult their lawyer.

They criticised the government for dragging its feet on the matter and pointed out that all cases before 2010 could be appealed in this way and that the issue could also have a ripple effect on several pending criminal cases.

The Justice Ministry, however, argued that the legal principle concerning the right of access to a lawyer before police interrogation had only been established by the European Court of Human Rights through judgments in 2008 and 2009.

“Before these dates, this right had not been definitively accepted,” the ministry said, using this as justification for not introducing the clauses in the law right after 2002.

After these judgments, the ministry pointed out, the amendments were introduced in February 2010.

The ministry criticised the impression which, it said, the Labour Party was giving when it argued that the Constitutional Court judgement could see blanket acquittals in the challenged cases brought before the courts. “The Constitutional Court, it has to be said, did not declare that the criminal proceedings... (in the test cases under review) should stop, or that the people involved should automatically be acquitted, or that the statements they released should be discarded from the proceedings,” the ministry insisted pointing out that such decisions were left to the courts before which the challenges would have been filed.