Often as not, the Hollywood ‘cops n’ robbers’ movies we watch furnish us with scenes in which a suspect is arrested, but refuses to speak to the police until he has the benefit of legal counsel.
The prisoner’s right to legal advice during questioning has become so firmly entrenched in our movie culture that some of us might be surprised to learn that no such right actually exists in Malta.
In the ‘bad old 1980s’, the police were so accustomed to disregarding detainees’ rights that when challenged in court, they would nonchalantly describe how they kept detainees far beyond the 48-hour limit without bringing them before a Magistrate; or how they would release them for an instant, only to promptly rearrest them.
If anybody thought of the right to legal counsel at all, it seemed so far ahead of reality that it did not seem a practical proposal to insist upon.
Human rights, essentially the shield of individual citizens from abuse of authority, were hotly and sometimes profoundly discussed for as long as spectacular violations were the order of the day. The Opposition which championed them in countless legal battles was deemed to be their eternal paladin.
Come 1987, the PN Opposition became the Government and human rights violations were assumed to have become a thing of the past. How could it be otherwise, after those long years of stirring rhetoric? Political violence did come to an end, but human rights violations did not. Nor could they reasonably be expected to become completely extinct.
It appears that it took 15 years, less 22 months, for legislation to be passed under a PN administration granting the right to legal counsel to arrested persons. Considering that Dr Eddie Fenech Adami, when still Opposition leader, made an unequivocal statement of intent in his final address to the nation before the May 1987 election, it is little short of astonishing that the Nationalist government afterwards dragged its feet for so long.
Be that as it may, seven years ago Government and Opposition voted unanimously in favour of the introduction of this basic right: a promise which both sides appear to have since forgotten.
Since that vote in 2002, the Minister responsible has not yet found the time to implement the unanimous decision of Parliament. And all along, in various measured statements leaked out to the press, Police Commissioner John Rizzo has repeatedly suggested that he himself opposes the reform... on the scarcely credible pretext that granting this right would make it harder for the police to ‘solve crimes’.
Meanwhile, a motion to implement the 2002 amendments, filed this week by Labour MPs Josè Herrera and Michael Falzon, has provoked a contradictory reaction from the Government side. The Minister for Justice and Home Affairs, Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, poured scorn on the motion, claiming that the two Labour MPs knew full well that he intended to get it going shortly himself.
On his part, Nationalist backbencher Franco Debono appeared to welcome the Opposition initiative and claimed that this particular matter was one of the gripes that drove him to absent himself from two votes in Parliament in protest.
If Mifsud Bonnici was galled by the march so opportunistically stolen on him by the Opposition, he had additional cause for irritation arising from Debono’s contribution. Truth be told, Mifsud Bonnici is under no pressure from the public to keep Eddie Fenech Adami’s 1987 electoral promise. But he has undeniably been under pressure from Debono – now backed by the Prime Minister, who appears keen to appease his unruly backbencher, even at the expense of annoying his Justice Minister.
Herrera and Falzon may seem like small fry to Mifsud Bonnici, who will be glad to ignore them completely beyond the smack down reply already given. Debono, on the other hand, is another matter: he represents a devaluation of Mifsud Bonnici’s rapport with the Prime Minister.
While all these Byzantine intricacies unfold before our eyes, the right of arrested persons to legal counsel, so long denied, may be significantly improved by political accident. Some people may note the irony in the action taken by Herrera and Falzon – given the ancient stereotype assigned to the PL as the villain in the piece on human rights issues in the 1980s. Less conspicuous, perhaps, is the irony that it had to be the PN – an erstwhile champion of human rights – to resist the amendments for seven whole years.
Thanks to Mifsud Bonnici’s outburst yesterday, we know that the long overdue enactment of this 2002 law is now inevitable. The Justice Minister may not relish the circumstances that forced his hand – and it would be monumentally ironic if he afterwards attempted to take the credit for it – but in a sense, this is the way things tend to progress, in a country mired in political division.
Ultimately it matters little if this latest reform was prompted by a childish sense of political pique between rival MPs, or even internal dissent among government backbenchers.
The important thing is that human rights which are taken for granted across the EU will finally become available to Maltese citizens. And let us be honest: about time, too...
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