Last Thursday, the Constitutional Court pronounced itself on the long-drawn case involving the ban of the play Stitching by the now defunct Theatre and Film Classification Board.

Among other demands, Unifaun Theatre Productions had asked the court to declare that the rating ‘banned’ by the board was in breach of its right to freedom of expression.

Although the theatre regulations were recently reformed, leading to the Classification Board being disbanded, the impact of this dangerous ruling should not be underestimated.

It is true that under the new arrangement, the State cannot stop a theatre production from being staged. However, this does not mean that there isn’t a whole host of other repressive laws that can still be invoked to take a theatre production to court after the fact.

Theatre regulation reform was an important step forward. But the fact remains that the project to reform the entire body of censorship law remains incomplete to this date. Even if Unifaun staged their play under the new regulations, they would still be at the mercy of outdated pornography, obscenity and blasphemy laws. The move to self-classification was an inspired one, though one that only scratched the surface of the problem.

What the Constitutional Court ruling effectively implies is that citizens have been stripped of constitutional protections when their freedom of expression intrudes upon the much-flaunted ‘moral issues’.

I was genuinely sorry to see the Constitutional Court appeal to Maltese exceptionalism once again, as if our country inhabited some alternate reality separate from that of mainland Europe, one in which our citizens could be denied what was allowed without a problem elsewhere.

The public should be grateful to Unifaun for its decision to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. I am afraid that the Constitutional Court’s decision has cleared the way for the censors of the future to trample on the freedom of conscience of our citizens through the often invoked yet rarely justified concept of ‘public’ morality.

I honestly wish Unifaun every luck in its undertaking.