Raphael Vassallo | Sunday, 17 January 2010

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Uh-Oh...!

I’ve never been a big fan of Teletubbies – or ‘Terror-tubbies’, as I once rechristened them after a failed babysitting experiment – but one of those ghastly little excuses for a deformed puppet has this incredibly contagious habit of suddenly uttering: “UH-OH!” when confronted with any given anomaly.

Well, I found myself doing exactly the same thing this week. No, I don’t mean prancing around like a twat with a handbag (I did that the week before, and have to admit it was quite liberating) – I mean scratching my head in bewilderment at a whole series of unexpected developments, which had me “UH-OH-ing” much like Winky-Wanky (or whatever his name was) at the belated revelation that this country is more seriously screwed that even I had ever imagined.

OK, let’s take them one by one. This week, the government finally published the legal notices that will bring into force the 2002 amendments to the Criminal Code that will...

CUT!

Sorry about that – almost forgot I had hired the services of a ‘column director’, whose job is to stop me in my tracks the moment I get too technical, boring, or simply drift off into a tangent from which there is no conceivable return. So to leave out the boring bits and cut directly to the chase: as of next month, persons under arrest and/or in police custody will finally have the right (so far denied) to speak to a lawyer before being interrogated by the police.

Which brings to my first UH-OH! of the day. For unless I am grossly mistaken (a not-unheard of eventuality), it was only Thursday of last week that the Justice Minister said it would be a mistake (or words to that effect) to rush into formalising these amendments into law.
What sort of Teletubbish is this? So on Thursday, Carm Mifsud Bonnici claimed he was in absolutely no hurry to enact the law: least of all, if the reason was merely to content one government rebel, and a couple of greedy Opposition MPs.
And yet, come the following Friday, the same Carm Mifsud Bonnici suddenly turns around and announces the immediate publication of the same legal notices, and that the law itself will come into force next month.
Is there something I’m missing here? Or did Mifsud Bonnici just break the World Land Speed Record in the political U-turn category?

But first, a small word about the troubled history of this particular milestone reform. The right to legal assistance in police custody first entered the political subconscious shortly before the May 1987 election, when Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami gave a rousing description of the ordeal faced by arrested persons in ‘the bad old days’ of Labour.
History being what it is, the PN went on to win that election, but... surprise! No sooner was Eddie Fenech Adami sworn in as Prime Minister, than all his previous enthusiasm to enact this reform suddenly evaporated. From one day to the next, it was no longer a priority to introduce human rights to Malta’s arrest and detention regime... perhaps because there were other, more pressing priorities at the time; or perhaps because, like certain Labour Prime Ministers before him, Dr Fenech Adami quickly recognised that the ability to engineer the occasional ‘spontaneous’ confession could come in useful once in a while.
Either way, we had to wait another 15 years for the relevant legislation to be unanimously passed by Parliament. (Remember the word ‘unanimously’: it will become important later on.) But those of you with an O-level in Mathematics will immediately infer a tiny, weenie chronological error in the above sequence of events.

Fifteen years after 1987? Surely that will land you in 2002... but unless I am reading the Gregorian Calendar wrong, it is now 2010. In other words, the law has existed on paper for almost exactly eight years. So why on earth are we still demanding the right it was supposed to deliver?
There are multiple answers to that question. One is purely procedural: it seems that laws are literally not worth the paper they’re written on, until they are enacted by means of a legal notice published in the Government Gazette (and which, in this case, was never forthcoming).
Another is purely political: like his predecessor Tonio Borg, Justice Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici was under pressure from the Police Commissioner John Rizzo, who publicly urged the government to delay the implementation of this electoral promise, if not to renege on it altogether.

If you ask me, however, an even more interesting question is this: considering that the government has resisted enacting this law for eight whole years, why did it decide to cave in precisely now?
Again, there are multiple answers... here are the ones I can think up offhand:
A) Nationalist MP Franco Debono now claims (though strangely, he didn’t quite say this when it really mattered) that his unpredictable behaviour last month had been motivated precisely by his own government’s failure to ever enact this reform. The same Debono occupies one of the government’s 35 parliamentary seats, and... UH-OH! By a huge coincidence, only one is currently needed to unseat the same government...
B) Catching a whiff of ministerial blood in the air, the Labour Party’s deputy speakers on Justice and Home Affairs, Jose Herrera and Michael Falzon, homed in for the kill: forcing Mifsud Bonnici’s hand by presenting a motion in Parliament, which would (if debated) have put the Justice Minister is the awkward position of having to argue against human rights.
C) This one may be coincidental, but while all this was going on, at least two cases were brought forward against Malta in the European Court of Human Rights. Both involve the lack of proper legal assistance while under arrest; and while the cases have not yet been concluded, it is a fairly safe bet that the Attorney General knows perfectly well that he doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and therefore pre-emptively moved to spare our country more embarrassment in future. (After all, you can call Dr Silvio Camilleri all sorts of names... but ‘ignoramus’ isn’t one of them).

Taken together, the above conditions make the Justice Ministry’s sudden capitulation this week altogether more comprehensible. But just when you thought it was safe to spend a night at the Depot... UH-OH!
Out comes a Labour party press statement, issued on Friday, and you suddenly realise that what is comprehensible to you or I, is something straight out of science fiction to the party that may well be in government in 2013.

According to Herrera and Falzon, the real reason that the Justice Minister first said ‘No way, Jose’ (literally, as it happens) and then contradicted himself eight days later was because the government was in a “state of panic”, as it ‘knew that it would lose the vote in Parliament.’

Huh? What do they mean, “lose that vote”? In this instance, the answer depends on an entirely subjective interpretation of what constitutes victory or defeat. Admittedly, the vote would have been deeply embarrassing to Carm Mifsud Bonnici, but not because it would have cost the government its parliamentary majority... only because it would have made him look more like a puppet in the hands of the Police Commissioner than he already did.
But the vote itself would definitely have passed, with the full support of the PN. How could it be otherwise, when:
A) the only potentially floor-crossing MP is arguing in favour of the reform, and not against. So why on earth should he suddenly vote against, and not in favour?
B) The same PN had unanimously (see? Told you it was important) approved the 2002 reform; and even if the bench composition may have imperceptibly changed since then, you can hardly expect the government to oppose its own initiative eight years later.
C) The Labour Party itself would no doubt have voted in favour, seeing as it had also – unanimously – approved the original law. But in this instance, the motion was fielded by two of its own MPs. So how can the same two MPs now claim that the motion would not pass? Did they intend to vote against it themselves?

Wait a sec: maybe they meant something else. By “lose the vote”, they might have meant “been forced to vote in favour of a motion put forward by the Opposition”... But if that’s the case... well, did the Labour Party “lose the vote” when it similarly supported the PN-led motion in 2002?

And there you have it. To say that the position assumed by the Labour Party was utter nonsense would be an understatement of the highest order: almost akin to... let’s take a wild guess here... the Nationalist Party attempting to take the credit for this reform itself, when in actual fact the same PN had resisted publishing those legal notices tooth and nail for almost two whole legislations...

UH-OH! You’re not going to believe this, but... that is exactly what happened. If you don’t believe me, check out the official PN statement on the party website: Labour, we are told, is trying to take the credit for THEIR (the PN’s) initiative... when it was THEY (the PN) which piloted this reform from day one...

Honestly. Where is Wanky-Wonky, anyway, when people really do need a good whack on the head with a handbag?

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