Former MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando is calling on the telecommunications companies and the government to stop blogs that, he said, have no journalistic purpose but constitute menacing content or annoyance.

In a judicial protest filed today, Dr Pullicino Orlando, executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, said that as a person in public life, he understood that he was subject to public scrutiny and journalistic comment and he did not wish to hinder this in any way. 

However, he had been subjected to blogs which only reported that he was abroad, or that he was at a restaurant with his partner or friends, who were not in public life.

Such stories had no journalistic value and were only aimed at annoyance, he said, Dr Pullicino Orlando said.

However, when such stories were published, they also exposed him to the risk of crime being committed against him, such as burglary when he was away. 

He therefore called on Vodafone and Go, as signatories of the Code of Conduct for Electronic Content Provision by Electronic Communications Undertakings to enforce its provisions about censoring menacing content.

He also expected Melita, which had not yet been set up when the code was drafted, to also adhere to its provisions.  

Dr Pullicino Orlando also called on the minister responsible for communications and the Malta Telecommunications Authority to consider such cases as a breach of the Electronic Commerce Act and to regulate illegal content which included the sort he was complaining about so that journalistic freedom was not used as an excuse to harm people.  

The judicial protest was signed by lawyers Veronique Dalli and Edward Gatt.