Ray Mangion

If the “Second Republic” means that the Constitution of our motherland is to be reformed, whatever the magnitude of the changes, amendments and additions, I am honestly for it.

I am more than convinced that the present charter that made us an independent and republican State is to stay. But thorough updating certainly needs to be undertaken even without crafting a new text from scratch. I will specifically mention two instances where modifications are required at bottom to strengthen the political and popular observance of the Constitution.

In the first place, the principle of supremacy of the Constitution is to be widened to capture the executive or, better, the Cabinet. So far, it extends only to the legislature to the effect that a law which is “inconsistent” with the Constitution may be challenged by any person in the constitutional courts.

Indeed, the doctrine of the ‘distribution of powers’ is very feeble and is structured to give great advantage to the executive over Parliament and the judiciary. Suffice it to state that the executive controls the House of Representatives through a majority, which it enjoys, and is poised to wield patronage in judicial appointments.

The executive is regulated by the so-called ‘political conventions’ that are codified in our Constitution and, therefore, the relevant provisions are also susceptible of infringement by an ‘inconsistent’ law.

But time is really high to extend the supremacy of the Constitution to the executive by self-enforcing dispositions. The Constitution is there to ensure transparency and accountability to the full as far as ministers are concerned. Not by the mere citation of “peace, order and good government”, the vaguest locution throughout, but by a concrete and automatic in-built measure of imputability. It is indubitably then that the rule of law will reign supreme.

The Constitution is silent on the fourth generation of human rights concerning freedom of information and communications

“Individual responsibility” – the Constitution does not mention “liability” – of any representative of the people at the helm of a portfolio should be rendered efficacious by the incorporation of a mechanism that would ipso facto suspend the elected member of the government concerned in case he prima facie breaches an express list of criteria. Our judicature did repeatedly determine that, under administrative law, one is to answer for one’s own misbehaviour.

Another part of the Constitution that has to be seriously revisited is the area of human rights. The Constitution contains two categories when, now, four generations are universally recognised.

The first group (chapter 4) deals with a number of ‘fundamental’ rights like life, speech, movement, assembly, and so on, that are justiciable and necessitate two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives to tamper with them. We have legislatively bolstered them up by espousing the European Convention of Human Rights that is, however, still couched in an ordinary enactment outside the Constitution.

The second batch of ‘human rights’ qua citizen (chapter 2) that includes the protection of the environment in one single clause, is only ‘declared’ by implication in the references to the duties of the State. The citizen is to be constitutionally treated better by the grant of a locus standi.

The Constitution in view of a Second Republic, whatever its interpretation and ultimate shape, has, of course, to be revised so that the country’s milieu and heritage are entrenched by ad hoc efficient safeguards by way of redress under a separate chapter.

Unbelievably, the Constitution that is now over 50 years old, is hitherto silent on the fourth generation of human rights concerning freedom of information and communications.

Now that the ‘knowledge era” has dawned, the media in general have unavoidably emerged with aspirations that are to be guaranteed through coercive mechanisms not only within ordinary but constitutional human rights parameters.

Ray Mangion is a lawyer and historian.

Mark Anthony Sammut

In the midst of the corruption crisis, whether we call it an nth republic (what’s in a name?) or a development in our Constitution (as in several amendments since 1964), we certainly need an overhaul of the institutions which limit government’s power, check its abuse and fight corruption.

This is what we are proposing in our document Restoring Trust in Politics launched by PN leader Simon Busuttil in early December, well before the new developments in the Gaffarena scandal and several new scandals, particularly the Panama affair, which have hit our government directly at its peak, in Castille.

The Constitution – any constitution – is a set of rules governing the relationship between the institutions of the State and its citizens. As such, it is a set of rules by which we make sure that politicians remain our servants, not become our masters helping themselves to our hard-earned cash.

The corruption crisis shows that it’s not just the people in government we need to change; we need a complete overhaul of our institutional system. The Prime Minister and ministers have too much power and, after electing them, we just have to trust they behave ethically.

But the last three years have been a huge betrayal of this trust in a whole series of scandals, ever increasing in seriousness. The sheer effrontery by which the Prime Minister has gone about building his government on graft and cronyism from day one has shown beyond any doubt that we have a set of politicians who gained power with the express aim – now proven in fact – of enriching themselves.

What we truly need is a clean republic: a complete overhaul of our institutions to fight the corruption that is destroying people’s trust in our system of government

We had the Prime Minister personally meeting people like the owners of Cafè Premier alone, without any civil servant, and awarding them millions in public funds through the Prime Minister’s own private e-mail account.

We had the Prime Minister creating a new agency, Identity Malta, stuffing it with party apparatchiks and their families, and dispatching his cousin to Algeria as our consul there. In no time we find that Identity Malta awarded 21,000 EU visas to non-EU citizens of Algeria and Libya in a huge corruption racket involving a former treasurer of the governing party.

We had the Prime Minister flying off secretly to Azerbaijan with his topmost minister in Castille and his right hand man in Castille who – on the very morrow of taking their oath of office – had started the process of opening secret companies in Panama, hiding them in secret trusts in New Zealand and attempting to open secret accounts in nine banks in secretive jurisdictions. All three are involved in a corrupt pre-election agreement with a private consortium to build an unnecessary, supposedly private, power station which they have guaranteed with public funds to the tune of €360 million.

We have a huge international corruption and money-laundering scandal in the Panama Papers with our government hit thrice over in the Prime Minister’s right hand man in Castille, his topmost minister cum governing party deputy leader, and the representative of Mossack Fonseca in Malta sitting in Castille.

And for the Prime Minister it’s as if the Panama Papers are some esoteric news item in a land far away with journalists only eking out of the Prime Minister some reference to some action because of the public outcry and not because of the substantive corrupt acts of his right hand men in Castille.

Amid all this corruption, do we need fancy names and numbers for our Republic? What we truly need is a clean republic: a complete overhaul of our institutions to fight the corruption that is destroying people’s trust in our system of government.

Mark Anthony Sammut is a PN candidate for the General Election.

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