Barely three weeks after warning against “trivilialising” human rights claims, Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent De Gaetano made a very significant public declaration about human rights in Malta, which practically went unnoticed.
In an interview with this newspaper late last month, he noted that general public awareness of what fundamental human rights really entail in practice was lacking in Malta.
“There is a lack of serious discussion at various levels of society. One comes across an almost flippant attitude in discussions on such issues as immigration or refugees, or the way appointments are made to government boards, or the length of judicial proceedings, or the way criminal investigations are carried out,” Dr De Gaetano, who sits on the European Court of Human Rights, said.
The interview was held as Malta marks the 50th anniversary of its joining the Council of Europe, eventuially acceding to the European Court of Human Rights in 1966-67.
Dr De Gaetano acknowledged that, for the ordinary citizen, accession to the Council of Europe and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights did not mean much immediately and “it was only in the late 1970s or early 1980s, because of the political situation then obtaining in Malta, that the legal profession first and then citizens generally became sensitive to the idea of fundamental human rights and alert to both direct and indirect violations of those rights”.
Admittedly, Malta has a “fairly good” record of compliance with ECHR judgments. The trend is positive and the statistics indicate an increase in the number of judgments against Malta that have been fully complied with by the authorities and a drop in the number of decisions pending before the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers.
This notwithstanding, the former chief justice still felt he had to point out that we are not as sensitive as we should be in terms of human rights.
This when we have been hearing so much, not just from lobby groups but also from politicians and even Cabinet ministers, about “civil” and “minority” rights. That is, of course, as it should be because none of us can ever let down our guard or take human rightsfor granted.
Just as bad is going to “the other extreme”, that is, seeing everything as being a fundamental human right. That is the point Dr De Gaetano, and two other ECHR judges, wanted to make in a dissenting opinion in the case of two Belgian brothers who claimed violation of human rights when they were slapped by police officers while in custody at a police station in Brussels.
While insisting that police violence was “unacceptable”, the dissenting judges felt that the slap did not reach the level of seriousness for the ECHR to find a violation of the brothers’ human rights to be protected from inhuman or degrading treatment.
Promoting and upholding human rights can, at times, be a difficult balancing act. The examples mentioned by Dr De Gaetano in his interview are good eye-openers: immigration/refugees, government appointments, the time it takes for judicial proceedings to be concluded and the manner in which criminal investigations are carried out.
The point he made about committal proceedings in Malta taking months, if not years, at times even ‘forcing’ magistrates to grant bail to the accused because they know the system will not, in most cases, provide for trial within a reasonable time, is very worrying.
It proves beyond reasonsable doubt there is still mlre work to be done in our justice system.