The Bill on Civil Unions has been passed. Another crucial blow for social justice in Malta has been struck. The battle to introduce same-sex legislation shone a spotlight on four of Malta’s top leaders. They delivered a mixed performance. The Prime Minister stuck firmly to the sweeping electoral mandate he received for the introduction of civil unions legislation. The Leader of the Opposition was unable to stand up to the conservative backwoodsmen in his party and emerged looking weak.

The Auxiliary Bishop and the former President of Malta came out of it diminished. Bishop Charles Scicluna’s cry that “This does not reflect the order established by God in Creation” demonstrated ignorance of human evolution, as well as of anthropological progress over the last 200,000 years.

President Emeritus George Abela allowed himself to be torn between his duty to the Constitution of Malta and his personal conscience. Disappointingly, and ill-advisedly, he allowed his conscience to undermine his duty under the Constitution. He left office under a cloud.

I make no apology for returning to this subject. In a country where observance of the rule of law is so pliable, where lawlessness is rife, where the egos of our leaders are so excessive, it is of paramount importance that the man or woman entrusted with safeguarding the supreme law of the land under the Constitution observes his obligations to it to the letter.

What Abela did could have caused a politico-constitutional crisis. Refusing to sign a Bill as required by the Constitution amounts to such a crisis.

Resigning and having to be replaced by another President appointed in his place would also constitute a crisis. These crises were avoided in Abela’s case by the Prime Minister choosing to bide his time.

In a country riven by deep political polarisation, a politico-constitutional crisis is the last thing Malta needed then – or subsequently. This is why the issue of the President’s duty and his personal conscience is of such importance.

Let me say at the outset that I bear President Emeritus Abela no ill-will. On the contrary, he conducted himself as President in most other respects with dignity, imagination and engaging humility.

He has deservedly been seen as a President who did outstanding philanthropic work and brought the presidency closer to the people.

It is therefore all the more painful that a President who won widespread affection for his approachability and human touch ultimately ignored his overriding duty to Parliament.

I acknowledge immediately that a President (or a constitutional monarch, on which our presidency is modelled) can sometimes find himself torn between duty and conscience. I do not for one single moment argue that our presidents should be without a conscience as some misguided correspondents have implied, nor that they do not have every right to their personal conscience.

My strong contention, however, is that for our Constitution to work, the President must invariably allow his sense of duty to the Constitution of Malta to override personal conscience.

As an aside, do any readers suppose that Queen Elizabeth II in the course of her 60-year reign did not sometimes disagree with legislation brought before her for signature, or that she signed the Same-sex Marriage Bill into law without holding conscientious personal views about it?

I would surmise that the latter were probably at variance with those expressed by her Parliament.

But her sense of duty as the constitutional monarch was implacable, and she signed the legislation without demur.

She might well have told the Prime Minister privately of her concerns (as indeed our President is entitled to do), but publicly, and constitutionally, she was duty-bound to follow Parliament’s will.

Conscience is defined as a person’s moral sense of right or wrong. I acknowledge that no person – not even a President – should be prevented from acting according to conscience where the Constitution allows him discretion to do so. And, indeed, Abela frequently exercised this right in the course of his presidency.

He clearly exercised his conscience when he chose to go to Peru on missionary work, leaving behind a government in political turmoil. He exploited it, too, when Pope Benedict XVI visited Malta, and he made some decidedly ill-judged remarks about secularism and anti-Christian governments in Europe, implying that the wave of secularism in some European States, “which holds that religion and religious bodies should have no part in political or civil affairs, was driving people to be laicist or even anti-Christian”.

It is all the more painful that a President who won widespread affection for his approachability and human touch ultimately ignored his overriding duty to Parliament

There is not a single country in Europe which fits this definition of secularism, nor are there any anti-Christian countries.

He exercised his personal conscience when he signed into law the Bill introducing divorce, an issue which the Church had strenuously opposed. Perhaps most directly, he exerted his personal conscience when he read out a highly politically charged (and insulting) speech from the throne last year, when it could justifiably be argued that as the supposedly unifying figure in Malta the President’s conscience should have pricked him sufficiently to refuse to read it.

These last two instances could have led to a constitutional crisis had he chosen to act differently – as, indeed, was almost the case over the Civil Unions Bill.

Looked at this way, the objective reader will immediately conclude that Abela not only exercised his conscience unhindered over five years, but also did so in a fairly selective, flexible and arbitrary manner. Was this healthy for our parliamentary democracy, or should a greater sense of duty have led the President to follow a different course?

This is the crux of the argument. Duty signifies a moral or legal responsibility to carry out tasks that one is required to perform as part of one’s Office. Duty is what makes a person do what he would rather not do, simply because it is the right and lawful thing to do. A strong sense of duty is the cornerstone of the presidency, a concept incidentally which underlies much of Christian teaching about personal conduct.

Duty, as embodied in the Office of the President of Malta, demands the subordination of self, of personal conscience, for the benefit of the parliamentary constitutional democracy he is there to safeguard. It is the duty of the President to undertake specific actions because the supreme law of the land requires it.

The quality, therefore, above all that should distinguish a President from the rest of us is an unswerving sense of duty and commitment to uphold the Constitution of Malta. No ifs or buts, the President has the duty to do so.

This does not mean the President is simply a rubber stamp, nor that he is not without considerable influence. But it is an iron rule of parliamentary democracy that no President’s conscience can ever be allowed to intrude in the performance of his constitutional role and that includes the categorical imperative to sign into law without delay Bills passed on Third Reading by a majority in the Parliament.

This is not some theoretical matter of conscience or principle. The hard reality is that if it were accepted that personal conscience should prevail over the President’s overriding duty to the Constitution he swore to defend and obey, we would be opening the path to anarchy.

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