Dr Mary Muscat. Photo: Jonathan Borg

A newspaper page that 30 years ago featured miscarriages of justice in Malta, including the Police’s misuse of power, could serve as a model for today’s human rights advocates, according to lecturer Mary Muscat.

Branded as Page Thirteen and complete with its own logo, the full-page weekly feature was published in The Sunday Times of Malta between July 1985 and October 1991.

The page focused almost entirely on miscarriages of justice, narrated in an accessible manner for readers who were not familiar with legalese – sometimes even dropping the odd joke.

For Dr Muscat, a lecturer within the Department of Civil Law, it was a means of disseminating information about the misuse of power – mostly the police’s – and a way of educating the public on human rights.

The page soon became part of Dr Muscat’s Sunday routine as a teenager, who before becoming a full-time academic, spent 13 years within the police force as an inspector. There, she set up the Community and Media Relations Unit.

Today, she will be speaking at a conference ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Organised by the Human Rights Programme of the University of Malta, and the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society, the conference is called Advocating for Human Rights. It will include a number of panel discussions about, among others, developments in human rights as a result of advocacy and freedom from violence.

Dr Muscat will be discussing Page Thirteen, which came at a time rife with civil society protests.

For her, the page is a clear example of rights-based advocacy dealing with a spectrum of issues, from the right to privacy to freedom from arbitrary arrest. In comparison, most advocacy nowadays focuses on one branch of human rights.

For at least 320 weeks, the page empowered readers with information that they would otherwise not have access to as some of the cases it featured were not even covered by regular press coverage.

In her study of Page Thirteen, Dr Muscat produced a four-tiered model that could be applied to any sector – including environment or culture – and guide people who would like to launch some similar advocacy on social media to produce an ethical and sophisticated product.

Even when speaking tongue-in-cheek, the team behind the page never attacked people personally, as is nowadays common tendency to do on social media.

They would, for example replace the word ‘thug’ with ‘a professor of democracy’. Meanwhile, instead of attacking the incompetence of an authority, they would say that the authority was competent and efficient enough to not do what it was meant to do, Dr Muscat explained.