You may not be thinking about this all the time, but we are experiencing a real crisis for civil rights in this country.
You can divorce and remarry. You can marry someone of your own gender. It is ridiculous to say it is all going downhill. The authorities grant us rights that cost them nothing but deny us rights that inhibit their autonomy. And gay or straight, married once or multiple times, one day it may very well be your turn to have your rights denied.
The past week alone should be enough to open your eyes.
Consider how a man who may or may not have mental health issues was locked up in a padded cell by a troop of policemen led by a superintendent after threatening to embarrass the Prime Minister in a crowded street.
No doubt there are situations when mental health patients do not know they need treatment. But there is a process in law designed for these situations. I have been reliably informed it was not applied in this case. Instead, for reasons that the Home Minister cryptically and angrily described as unspeakable in public, due process was dispensed with and out of the way he was dragged.
Consider how immigration authorities randomly stopped vaguely foreign looking people peacefully going about their business walking on the waterfront or riding a public bus. They were asked to hand over their papers like residents of the ghetto walking about after curfew. If unable to prove they had a right to be on the street they were arrested: 13 arrests in one morning in Buġibba, by one account.
The targets were people from the Balkans: Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians. The authorities profiled a race and forced people who looked like they belong to it to answer questions that would not be asked of someone who can swear in the vernacular.
It has happened before. In April 2017 the police wanted to show how tough they were by collectively arresting people for the combined crime of being black and waiting for a ride at the Marsa roundabout.
Rhetoric of “cleaning the streets” and “deporting undesirables”, pulled straight out of prosaic WWII movies, rolled easily off the tongues of commenters here.
Consider how a Sicilian man with a business in Malta, desperate to save his remaining trucks from destruction from a fire spreading from the first truck of his engulfed in flames, allegedly asked too much of the police watching the spectacle for entertainment. Video footage shows them pin him to the wall and punch him in the face while he offers no resistance. Next to him, his minor son is getting similar treatment from the boys in blue.
The matter is being “investigated” but no procedural clichés here: the policemen don’t get to give up their badge and side arm while the matter is being looked into. After all, no one can ask the police to step aside.
Consider how the Constitutional Court had to twice find that the fact that Silvio Valletta was heading the investigations into the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia was illegal before he stepped aside nine months too late. His wife is a government minister, and by his own account her colleagues are potential suspects in the crime.
The court could decide that because Daphne’s surviving family complained their human rights were breached and the court found in their favour. They’re close enough to the case to have a right to complain.
There is close to zero judicial review of government action
Valletta is still the man with the exclusive authority to investigate his wife’s colleagues for several other crimes: bribery and money laundering to name two. One should think his continued presence there is just as illegal, and yet who has the right to complain to a court that the authorities are breaching our rights?
Major question that.
At one point Simon Busuttil was told he has no legal standing arguing in court that Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi should be investigated. Whose rights are breached when corruption is allowed to fester? Everyone’s. And yet there doesn’t seem to be legal recourse to pursue justice to limit the government’s excess.
Consider how the Attorney General argued in the Constitutional Court I had no right to complain about the daily removal by State action of flowers, candles and messages of protest at the site in Valletta demanding justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia because I did not prove I put them all there myself.
This ‘legal standing’ issue has become a convenient way the government can ride roughshod over citizens’ rights. It may be inhibited by human rights law to suppress the rights of an individual, but it cannot be stopped in suppressing the rights of large numbers of people as none of them can show they are specific victims.
You are squeezed between Scylla and Charybdis. Take the issue of racial profiling. If you are its victim you want to lie low for as long as you can until you are caught and deported. If you are a concerned citizen you are told that no court has ever found the State’s action illegal. If you decide to test the matter in court yourself you are told you are not a victim and therefore have no juridical interest in the matter.
End result: racial profiling rules.
All other possible means of restraint for executive power in Malta are near non-existent.
There is no oversight by the legislature whatsoever, unless your idea of ‘oversight’ is a late night speech in an empty chamber by a broadly ignored backbencher who rambles to no one in particular.
Parliament has no resources, its Members are part-timers whose first job is getting re-elected and their second job is the profession that earns them their keep.
There is close to zero judicial review of government action unless in cases of individuals stubborn enough to spend a decade waiting for a decision from Strasbourg after much pointless torture on the way in the Valletta courts.
But even then, once Strasbourg, as it almost inevitably does, finds against the government, the latter will proceed to pay its fine and otherwise ignore the ruling.
The law is not changed to fit into the finding of the Strasbourg court. At best, it is changed to preserve the status quo and prevent the repeat conviction of the government in identical circumstances.
Institutions are autonomous only in name. Police commissioners get fired more frequently than football coaches until one is found that understands who butters their bread. Regulators are extensions of executive power, not any limitation to it.
Even the last moral front of civil society is incoherent, compromised and weak.
Broadly speaking, academics are dormant or they play possum to avoid retribution. NGOs are distracted by the daily grind of hopelessly standing with the next historical house or ancient tree being kissed by the wrecking ball.
Political parties are either marketing machines or bankrupt shells that wish to be marketing machines. None of them do any politics at all.
The press is either a compromised vessel of the parties’ marketing machines or is moribund and underfunded, as all the other institutions that are supposed to guard our civil rights.
In this context you may be the next one to be stopped in the street for no reason at all, having to account for yourself. And there will be no one there to stop them taking you away.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece