Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera has been elected by her peers to represent them on the Commission for the Administration of Justice. Please sit down and digest this properly: Magistrate Scerri Herrera, who was rapped by the same Commission for her unseemly conduct, is now going to oversee the ethical conduct of the judiciary in Malta.

What possessed her colleagues to do this? It is unlikely that there was a block-vote by ‘Labour-leaning’ magistrates. Firstly, the sitting magistrates sworn in after 2013 are outnumbered by the rest. Secondly, there is ample evidence that magistrates (and judges) with known past political affiliations go on to rise to the stature expected of their new calling. Was her election a sop after her promotion ambitions were frustrated? Was it simply because she is the longest-serving sitting magistrate? Do these reasons make her fit for purpose for such a sensitive role? Perhaps it takes a thief to catch a thief?

Scerri Herrera has the doubtful distinction of being the very first government nominee to the position of judge to be successfully blocked by the Commission, as a result of the (very limited) implementation of legal reforms recommended by Judge Giovanni Bonello during the 2013-2017 administration.

Her questionable choice of friends may not be her only error of judgement. Magistrate Scerri Herrera wrote the now-notorious 2016 report on the judicial inquiry into the Paqpaqli għall-Istrina crash that completely exonerated President Coleiro Preca and pinned the main blame on the driver of the supercar, Paul Bailey. But when Bailey sued the organisers for health and safety failings, he did not limit himself to the committee that had also been named by Scerri Herrera’s report. He also sued the President. So did the victims. President Emeritus George Abela’s recent testimony indicated that he is in complete disagreement with the President’s insistence that she should not bear any responsibility for the crash.

All this is important because, when combined with Scerri Herrera’s too-cozy relationships with politicians, which was partly why she was sanctioned and blocked by the Commission, it gives rise to a niggling doubt. If it turns out that President Coleiro Preca bears responsibility, can the public be satisfied that the conclusions of the magistrate’s Paqpaqli report were due ‘only’ to some objective oversight or inadequate weighing of evidence? Or could the magistrate’s exoneration of the President have been influenced by political or friendship considerations? Did anyone lean on the magistrate?

Could the magistrate’s exoneration of the President have been influenced by political or friendship considerations?

There is no proof of this at present. But there is a shadow of a doubt. The Maltese judiciary has been rocked with enough scandals in recent years, with its top members jailed, driven to suicide or aided by the government to evade sanction. The Commission needs Magistrate Scerri Herrera like a man with a wooden leg needs termites.

Nadurgate – what is the real problem?

Carnival has come – twice – and gone. But one story has lingered; the tomfoolery of some Nadur youths who plastered their crass views of mental health on a battered van and paraded it during their anarchic carnival.

But what was the greater problem - the words written on the van, or the sorry state of the van itself that accurately represented mental health provision?

Mental health has long been the Cinderella of health services in Malta, and Mount Carmel Hospital has been sinking into a Dickensian quagmire for some years now.

Almost two years ago a man escaped by climbing a tree; he has still not been traced. In the past few weeks another man who was meant to be under constant surveillance let himself out from a bathroom window and was later found dead.

A few days later yet another escaped and was mercifully caught before he did any harm. Fights have broken out, and the building is in such a shambles that inmates have had to be evacuated from some wards and squashed into the remaining ones. Staff have had to threaten industrial action to get something done.

The hospital is cruelly understaffed, partly because anyone who can pull strings to get out of the spiralling mess is doing so, and partly because of the general policy of granting any requests by anyone in the pre-election spree of vote-securing favours.

To top it all there is a rumour going around that the government is concocting another famous public-private health deal that will miraculously turn around Mt Carmel, presumably with slightly better results that the VGH swindle.

If so, will this affect government’s planned refurbishment of the hospital? 

How ironic that Minister Chris Fearne sought to reassure people by saying that eventually Mt Carmel would reach the golden standard that has been set not by the privately managed or owned hospitals in Malta, but by Mater Dei.

And the words used by the Nadur youths were the problem? Go ahead, shoot the non-PC messengers.