Updated with Parliamentary Secretary's reaction

A recently-introduced legal notice about billboards muzzled freedom of expression and was a financial burden on businesses, Nationalist Party justice spokesman Jason Azzopardi said in Parliament this morning.

Dr Azzopardi was introducing his parliamentary motion to repeal the legal notice introduced in March. The notice requires every billboard to have a permit and introduces a yearly €1,500 fee for advertisers. 

Dr Azzopardi said the legal notice went against the European Convention of Human Rights, which only limited freedom of expression in seven instances. This legal notice did not fall under any of them, he said. 

The notice, he said, was introduced hastily last March after the Nationalist Party embarked on its billboard campaign criticising the government following the Panama Papers scandal.

And in its bid to strangle the PN’s freedom of expression, the government came up with a legal notice which badly affected the commercial community, Dr Azzopardi argued.

The notice, he said, was so draconian that one article even permitted the government to enter private property to remove a billboard.

Parliamentary Secretary Deborah Schembri denied that the legal notice had been drawn up to restrict the Opposition’s right to express itself in the wake of the Panama Papers.

On entering office last January, she said, she found that work had already being carried out to address the loopholes in the existing legislation as well as the discrepancies between Transport Malta regulations and the planning policies.

The real aim of the exercise, she said, was to clean the mess following the proliferation of signs and billboards.

Dr Schembri said that although the legal notice would not be revoked, its drafting could be improved and further fine-tuning was being undertaken.