From censorship of plays to the suppression of a newspaper, Malta appears to be sliding towards cultural and religious intolerance. By Raphael Vassallo
Yesterday’s landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which would strip Italian classrooms of religious symbols (namely, the crucifix), is as good an illustration as any of the gulf that now separates Malta from its fellow European Union member states.
As Europe shifts a gear in its haste towards secularisation – perhaps a little too clumsily, as initial reactions to yesterday’s ruling in Italy suggest – Malta appears to be striking in the complete opposite direction.
Only very recently, the University felt the need to publicly deny rumours that it was planning to remove crucifixes from its lecture halls; and just in case this was not enough to dispel the perception of an imminent slide towards secularism, within weeks the same University administration moved with unprecedented ferocity to clamp down on an ‘obscene’ student publication.
The offending student newspaper is appropriately named ‘Ir-Realta’. Reality, it seems, is just too much for the University chaplaincy to cope with; and in what is fast becoming a standard feature whenever the Religious Right flexes its muscles in this country, the Malta Police Force came scurrying to obey.
The upshot? All copies of Ir-Realta’ were binned by the University beadle, and its editor, 21-year-old Mark Camilleri, has been summoned to give a statement at the Police Depot tomorrow.
Similarly, the author of the piece, 36-year-old Alex Vella Gera, found himself interrogated via a long-distance phone-call to Luxembourg, where he now resides. “We’ve really hit rock bottom,” he confided to me late last week. “Actually,” I replied, “we’ve discovered a new bottom we never knew the rock even had...”
And that’s just University. Elsewhere, Malta has seen a whole series of often remarkable efforts – invariably on the part the country’s self-appointed ‘moral custodians’, none of whom appears to have any particular qualifications in this regard – to simply shut up anyone whose views happen to differ from their own.
So a stage-play which won two separate drama awards – Best New Playwright (Evening News) and Best New Play (Time Out) – was not good enough for Malta’s Board of Stage and Film Classification: the only one of its kind in Europe to still retain the power to ban a play outright.
Local theatre company Unifaun Productions was left with no option but to pursue the matter at the Constitutional Court, citing a breach of fundamental human rights; and it seems that the producers of Ir-Realta’ are actively considering the same option.
“It is a little too early to say what action we will take, as my client has not yet been prosecuted by the police”, Realta’ lawyer Alex Sciberras said yesterday. “But as things stand, the direction this issue is likely to take points towards the Constitutional Court...”
Camilleri himself expects to be prosecuted as a matter of course.
“There is a probability that the police will be taking legal action against us, as I have been asked by Inspector Jesmond Micallef to make a statement,” he said. “However we do not rule out taking this issue to an international court. We have also started a coalition called Front Kontra ic-Censura, which has the aim to present a document with legal proposals to abolish censorship to parliament...”
Even as the newly formed coalition struggles to get its voice heard at the House of Representatives, a parliamentary committee, headed by Nationalist MP Franco Debono, has just been appointed precisely to revise archaic laws, and update them for application in the 21st century.
Dr Debono told MaltaToday that the committee has not yet had its first meeting, and was therefore unable to confirm whether Article 7 of the Press Act - cited in defence of the University ban – will be among the laws to be reviewed.
“But these are the types of laws will be looking at,” he explained, “and if they are found to be anachronistic, they will be updated.”
This long overdue process will therefore come too late to rectify recent injustices, including a scarcely believable six-month prison sentence (suspended for two years) meted by the Magistrates’ Court to a man who dressed up as an Apostle for last year’s Nadur Carnival.
Nor will the parliament committee consider the question of why so many censorial decisions have been taken in the past two years alone – decisions which have even included a ban on naked clothes dummies in shop windows... reminiscent of the old Victorian anecdote, whereby piano legs were deemed too ‘curvaceous’ to be seen, and were covered accordingly.
The producers of Realta’ are however less circumspect.
“The fact is that we have just had a new Bishop and he would surely like to assert his authority,” Camilleri said when asked to account for the sudden hardening of the local religious right.
Considering that Malta’s two new bishops, Paul Cremona and Mario Grech, have already marked their territory by waging an all-out war on secularism – comparing it, among other things, to the threat of Nazism in World War Two – we can only brace ourselves for more displays of cultural intolerance in months and years to come.
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