Tomorrow, it will be exactly seven weeks since the Labour government decided to sledgehammer madame justice’s knees.
On 15 December, prime minister Robert Abela furiously declared a war on criminal lawyer and anti-corruption activist Jason Azzopardi.
“The extremist faction of the Nationalist Party, through Jason Azzopardi, wants to throw a mother of two into jail, just because she is the wife of a minister,” Abela claimed. “The wife” is Deborah Camilleri, Gozo minister Clint Camilleri’s significant other.
One of Azzopardi’s recent requests for a magisterial inquiry was based on the claim that the Camilleris knew about a racket involving mooring spots and jobs in Gozo’s Mġarr harbour.
Deborah Camilleri works at Transport Malta. In his request, Azzopardi further claims that she was carrying out private legal work during office hours.
Robert Abela’s government desperately wants you to feel threatened by such requests. The framing of that opening sentence is telling. The emphasis on the fact that Mrs Camilleri is a mother of two is an especially slimy touch.
The magistrate who receives the request for an inquiry gets to decide what to make of it. Fundamentally, the magistrate’s job at that stage is to determine whether there is enough evidence to suggest that a crime has been committed. The prime minister speaks as if Jason Azzopardi was appointed judge, jury, and executioner.
Branding Azzopardi “a liar”, the prime minister said that Mrs Camilleri had either continued working on her private practice outside office hours, taken leave, or asked for permission from her superiors. Nothing about the mooring racket, of course, but don’t let that inconvenience the narrative.
“Since 2013, the Labour Party decided to ignore these evil and baseless attacks instead of responding with force. A mistake. A line has now been crossed and I will not allow any Nationalist Party or anyone who conspires with it to abuse magisterial inquiries any longer and put people through judiciary processes for nothing,” Abela declared, going as far as comparing the process of being investigated by an inquiring magistrate to Christ’s crucifixion.
“As someone who is moved by the forces of good, I am not afraid, nor will I ever be afraid of these dark forces,” he continued.
“And if these (dark) forces think they will destroy a minister and his family unjustly, they know they must first deal with me, and that in that battle, they know who will win and who will lose. I asked the justice minister to finalise the magisterial inquiry reform as soon as possible so this abuse can stop once and for all,” the statement concludes.
Jason Azzopardi isn’t out to please anyone, and his theatrics sometimes do get in the way of the activism. I’ve criticised him publicly before and wouldn’t mind doing so again if I felt it were pertinent to do so.
The man is many things to many people, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes talking to him knows that his reverence for the law and due process is the singular most outstanding quality about him.
The fact is that Azzopardi is good at what he does, and his track record for such requests proves it. Magistrates have no obligation to follow through with inquiries that often take years to conclude because Azzopardi asked nicely.
Magistrates follow through with such inquiries because the facts that are laid out in the request make for a compelling case. Thanks to the efforts of investigative journalists, anti-corruption activists were able to put two and two together and effectively ask a magistrate to confirm whether the result was, in fact, four.
The mere suggestion that the Labour Party turned the other cheek whenever someone criticised them is as laughable as it is offensive. Though Abela lives in a fantasy world in which members of his beleaguered government never do any wrong, the fact is that there is so much dirt on the Labour government that just one of these inquiries was enough to land dozens of corrupt individuals in court.
The judiciary doesn’t do anything that does not have its basis in fact. The system which empowers them has guardrails in place. Anyone who feels slighted by a judgement has the right to appeal it. The real problem is the fact that they do not have enough resources, and so, judgements take far longer than they should.
And, for what it’s worth, I really cannot let go of this piece before pointing out just how pathetic and sad it is to hear a prime minister talk about facing extremist factions in battle.
Judging from the gladiatorial tone he adopted throughout this seven week rampage, it seems like Robert Abela’s been drinking Ridley Scott’s Kool-Aid. Nothing signals weakness more than the most powerful man in the country resorting to open threats to enforce authority that he already wields by popular mandate.
He vaguely declared that public officials will be shielded from facing criminal proceedings in their personal capacity.
His government is obsessed with trying to find new ways to brand critics as hypocrites while infallibly missing every single opportunity to at least acknowledge the validity of that criticism.
The prime minister openly calls on his loyal puppet of a police commissioner to hunt down whistleblowers. He gaslit the entire medical profession by claiming there was “absolutely no link” between overcrowding at Mater Dei Hospital and the fact that his government orchestrated a corrupt, fraudulent deal involving three public hospitals.
He claimed “the state did all it can” do to put Yorgen Fenech on trial as quickly as possible, even though it is well-known that his government deliberately failed to allocate enough resources to the judiciary in the five years he’s been in charge.
And now, the full-frontal assault – increasing the burden of proof required for an inquiry to be initiated, stalling the process by giving the police commissioner six months to decide whether to investigate, binding magistrates to a stricter two-year deadline, and tighter oversight on the inquiring magistrate’s expenditure.
They even wheeled out that decrepit has-been, Carmelo Abela, to shed crocodile tears in Parliament about what evil old Jason Azzopardi did to him, a surreal freak show that culminated in the Labour Party’s claim that the Nationalist Party’s way of doing politics is “cruel and heartless”.
You know what’s really heartless?
Branding everyone who stands up to your corruption as an extremist and a traitor.
Allowing human rights abuses in detention centres and within our prison system and then holding absolutely nobody responsible for those abuses whenever they are uncovered.
Deliberately suppressing the police force and the office of the attorney general by putting two sniveling sycophants in charge.
Ignoring the judiciary’s desperate pleas for more resources and for better infrastructure to better be able to keep up with their workloads, and then adding insult to injury by claiming you’ve invested more than anyone else ever has.
Building an entire governance system on clientelism and corruption and then obstructing justice whenever it manages to find you.
Murdering a journalist and then spending years covering it up and torturing her surviving family by doing whatever you can to sabotage her legacy and refusing to repair the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s psyche as a result.
Trying to kill off public interest journalism by systemically delegitimising press reports and referring to them as if they were fantasies written on the back of a napkin and not rigorous, well-researched collaborative efforts that expose corruption.
Abela thinks he is building a castle around himself and his handful of allies, effectively assuming the role of patron saint for the venal and the corrupt.
They genuinely seem to believe that, by passing this legislation, they will shield themselves from the repercussions of the crimes they know they’ve committed.
Intoxicated as they are with their own power, they refuse to understand that the hour of reprisal is upon them, and it is not looking at them kindly.
They do not see that this war against all dissidents will only speed up the inevitable demise of their own government.
The prime minister acts like an impotent emperor clinging to the trappings of the throne, failing to realise that he is losing control of the empire in the meantime.
“The line” wasn’t crossed when Azzopardi filed that request in December of last year.
The line was crossed when the Labour Party swept to power to bankrupt the country’s soul and loot its coffers.
Excellent