The anti-vilification of religion law has been repealed, the provisions of the anti-hate law have been broadened, but the debate continues. Sharp as the debate is, however, the government and its critics are focused on one set of victims while not saying much about another.

The government assures us that nothing has changed except the terms under which a prosecution takes place: we have a better law that can still hammer and nail hate-spewing bigots but, now, without exposing artists to collateral damage. (Such as having a judge declare – as Joseph Zammit McKeon did only a few years ago in connection with blasphemy – that the theatrical representation of vilification of religion is no different from the actual vilification of religion. It makes you wonder what the judge makes of Germany, which prohibits and prosecutes the display of Nazi symbols in public life, but puts up with their display in film.)

The critics include not just the Opposition and Archbishop Charles Scicluna, but also a former judge on the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, Giovanni Bonello, and the University of Malta’s Dean of the Faculty of Laws, Kevin Aquilina. They remain unimpressed by the government’s argument since vilification is not the same crime as hate speech.

Prosecuting one crime under the terms of another might end up making successful prosecution more difficult if not, sometimes, impossible. Writing in these pages a few days ago, Aquilina showed how, in two recent clamorous cases, the work of the prosecution has been unnecessarily complicated.

The Opposition’s Jason Azzopardi, in his turn, has drawn attention to the issue of public order and why the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights finds good, secular reasons to uphold anti-vilification laws: they are part of the protection of freedom of conscience. Yes, the same protection given to outspoken critics of religion.

But even Azzopardi ignores one necessary conclusion. Like everyone else, he seems to accept the idea that, faced with a case (say, the recent desecration of copies of the Quran in the Mater Dei multi-faith prayer room), one has to decide whether it constitutes a hate crime or vilification of religion.

Why does it have to be either/or?  Can’t a single event involve two crimes or more?

Prosecuting one crime under the terms of another might end up making successful prosecution more difficult if not, sometimes, impossible

The police routinely prosecute on the assumption that the same event – sometimes even the same action – can see more than one law broken. A killer brought to trial for a shootout in a bar will usually face charges not just for murder but also for, say, unlawful possession of a firearm and disturbance of the public peace.

The police don’t do this only to try and maximise the sentence. There’s a principle involved. Different crimes can have different victims. The survivors of the shootout may have escaped without a scratch, without an attempt made to kill them, but they were given the fright of their lives. They deserve justice too.

In the Quran desecration case, the debate’s focus has been on the victims targeted: Muslims. Hence the government’s assurance that, under the new provisions, the perpetrators can still be brought to justice.

The justice minister may well be right. The desecration of the Quran in a prayer room might, plausibly, be compared to spray-painting a swastika on the wall of a synagogue: an actual case which, in mainland Europe, was interpreted to be a hate crime, since the target was not a religion but a people.

However, the victims in the Mater Dei case can hardly be said to be only Muslims. Anyone, Muslim or not, who walked into that prayer room and discovered those Qurans would have been shaken.

In addition, there are conditions under which the very work of the hospital – ensuring the recovery and repose of its patients – may have been made more difficult if some patients and visitors feel less welcome and secure. Or if the hospital feels the need to dedicate more resources to security.

The crime itself might serve to provoke an even more vicious crime, a terrorist act, perhaps against the hospital itself.

All these possible consequences concern public order in general, not Muslims only. And the victim of crimes against public order is the general public: all of us, whether Muslim or not, religious believers or scoffers, horrified by the crime or not.

As the general public, we are not victims of a hate crime. It’s public order that has been damaged. Our lives have been rendered less secure, our trust in public spaces undermined. And, if the case involves an attack on the freedom of conscience of some religious believers (because, as the Strasbourg court says, their freedom is inhibited), then it’s an attack on the freedom of conscience of all. We either all have freedom of conscience or we’re all vulnerable.

It’s true that the Opposition has pointed out the security and public order issues. However, it has not underlined that this means that a crime like that committed at Mater Dei – indeed, any crime covered by the repealed vilification law – involves two different sets of victims: the adherents of the vilified religion and, for different reasons, the general public.

Once this is pointed out, the justice minister’s breezy assurance that ‘we can get them for hate’ is rather blithe. It offers no justice for the general public.

For all I know, the minister might even be taken aback by an argument saying the public is an additional injured party in this case. It wouldn’t be surprising, given that this government has shown scant appreciation of public goods and interests. It behaves as though all that exists or matters is the sum of various special interests, not goods and interests that we have in common.

Neither is it surprising that Denmark – not exactly a bastion of the Catholic counter-reformation – should last year decide to retain its anti-vilification law together with its jail term. The secular Danes have a strong sense of public goods, the public interest and public order.

Moreover, the Danes don’t have the religious hangover that some of our quaint homegrown humanists have, who can’t get beyond seeing the anti-vilification law as a repressive clerical instrument.

The Danes are clear-sighted enough to realise that whether a law is a clerical instrument or not depends on who defines what vilification and public order are. In their case – as it is in ours – it’s the judiciary, not the offended religious party, that decides if the anti-vilification law has been broken.

In the notorious Mohammed cartoons case, the Danish courts rejected the argument that the cartoons broke the law. But they didn’t reject the law then and, a decade later, they reaffirmed it. They’re mature enough to see its point while being strictly secular.

Some day, perhaps, we – the politicians, the judiciary, the public – will get there too. Meanwhile, the case of the repealed vilification law can stand as a symptom of our numbed sense of public interest, so deadened we hardly notice when it is damaged.

ranierfsadni@europe.com