Total system failure: please reboot your country

I hate to say it, but all the available evidence now points towards Malta as a failed experiment in nation-building.

In the space of just a few days, our inability to produce even a single credible and consistent institution has finally been dragged out into the hideous light for all to see and shudder at. And just to underscore the sheer precariousness of a country built on such shaky foundations, each of these damning revelations happened to concern one of the pillars that traditionally prop up the State: the executive, legislative and the judiciary (with the media thrown in for good measure).

Can anyone therefore be surprised, if - not unlike Samson at the Temple of Dagon - it ultimately took very little to bring the entire edifice crashing down about our ears? A glib, throwaway comment by the Prime Minister in parliament last Wednesday; a passing remark by the Speaker of the House the day before; one or two seriously botched court rulings in the background... and before you know it, the credibility of the entire Maltese State lies bleeding slowly to death at our feet.

Here is a select list of a few of the institutions that have been weighed in the scales of functionality, and found to be severely wanting. But by all means feel free to add to it as more individual cock-ups come to light in future...

Perilous Police

Never mind the goddamn horses. If there was a single revelation that shook the credibility of the Malta Police Force to its very foundations this week, it was the astounding comment - by a Prime Minister who has been technically responsible for the same police force since July- that 13 people in police custody somehow managed to fall off the boundary wall of the Floriana Depot between 2001 and 2012.

Please note: PEOPLE. Not horses. You do understand the difference, don't you? Reason I ask is because... well, given the failure of anyone to actually react, one would assume it was perfectly normal for people to just take a tumble off the bastions while supposedly under the protection of the police. Well, sorry to relieve you of your illusion, but... normal is the one thing it certainly is NOT.

In fact it is difficult to even imagine a more thoroughly abnormal state of affairs, than for 13 otherwise healthy adult human beings to walk into the Police Headquarters on their two feet through the front door... only to eventually be scooped up off the football pitch of the school next door, and (in most cases) rushed to hospital by ambulance.

Seriously, folks. It's the sort of revelation one associates with South Africa at the height of apartheid.

Yet the Police Commissioner had nothing to say about an apparent epidemic of copycat accidents/suicide attempts having occurred right under his own nose over the past decade. But no sooner did an intrepid team of journalists film a couple of rats and an under-nourished horse at the police stables... than suddenly John Rizzo sprang into action like a juggernaut: issuing detailed press statements, inviting the press to take a tour of the stables, etc.

Why was no such invitation extended in connection with an apparent slew of mysterious accidents at the police depot? Is that the sort of thing we reserve only for horses... and to hell with people, because they're ultimately not all that important?

None of this might bother the nation as a whole - and that in itself makes you seriously wonder what sort of a nation this is, anyway - but you know what? It bothers me.

It would bother me even if they were indeed all purely 'accident' scenarios... after all, that would only mean that it was beyond the police's capabilities to prevent the same accident from recurring in the same place (to the same category of victim) over a period of 10 years.

However, there is also a niggling doubt over how 'accidental' these 'accidents' really were. Unlike Evarist Bartolo (see page 22) I have not seen the CCTV footage presented to the inquiring magistrate. But if it is true that this footage was edited, then there would be every reason to treat at least the Nicholas Azzopardi case as a possible murder scenario, followed up by a good old-fashioned police cover-up.

Even from the little we do already know about that case, there is already ample reason to doubt the official version of events. You can read all about the details in other parts of this newspaper... meanwhile let us not forget the other great revelation of the week.

Parliament fouled

I guess it wasn't enough for the prime minister to demolish the reputation of the police force in one fell swoop last Wednesday.

The Speaker of the House had to also remind us that the present government has hijacked the reins of Parliamentary procedure to serve its own partisan interests: exploiting, cannibalising and ultimately demolishing what little remained of Malta's democratic credentials in the process.

What Frendo said last Monday is effectively (though of course he worded it differently) a shocking indictment of the present administration - and, to be fair, all its forebears - for having constantly and unapologetically defecated on what used to be the highest institution in the country.

I say 'used to be', because when Parliament ceases to serve any function other than to rubberstamp the intentions of a political  party that doesn't even occupy a majority of seats any more... well, you can no longer really call it 'democratic', or for that matter even a 'parliament' (the word comes from French, and is supposed to imply 'discussion'.)

Yet the same Lawrence Gonzi who made it his mission (and no one else's) to build a brand new House of Parliament at our expense, has also presided over a government which has hamstrung and sabotaged the existing Parliament's internal mechanisms... to a point where they simply no longer function at all, or at least not for the purpose they were originally devised.

And for this we have the word of former foreign minister Michael Frendo, who admitted on Monday that "the Chair [i.e., himself] is not happy with the existing regulations, which effectively place all the keys in government's hands..."

For reasons that are slightly too complicated to list out here in full, it transpires that the party in government (whose members, being mostly lawyers, know a thing or two about bending rules without actually breaking them) has managed to engineer a situation whereby government uniquely gets to pick and choose which motions get to be debated in the House, and which are consigned to the legislative rubbish heap. 

It is cold comfort to know that former Labour governments had all behaved the same way when the shoe was on the other foot - and there are rulings by former Speaker Myriam Spiteri Debono to prove it. All this means is that both parties are equally guilty when it comes to defecating on democracy for their own political gain; and considering that the sum total of their disfigurement of parliament's standing orders means that they have also barred the door to third party representation, we now stand condemned to an eternity of the same two criminally exploitative parties controlling parliament as if it were their own private backyard.

Ultimately, whichever party wins even a slender relative majority of votes (which it can afterwards even go on to lose - it doesn't matter, there is always the Constitution to dish out a few seats to MPs who didn't make their quota, and therefore did not really get elected at all) now gets to occupy a situation of total dictatorship for five years.

It passes what legislation it likes, and quashes all discussion that it doesn't want to hear... and such is its disgusting hypocrisy that even the Speaker appointed by the same government now struggles to conceal his own personal repugnance at a situation which no longer even pretends to resemble a democracy at all.

Jumping judiciary

OK I've left myself with too little space to properly evaluate the last pillar that came tumbling down this week. But if there is one institution whose credibility no country can realistically afford to lose, that would have to be the law courts.

Sometimes, however, I wonder whether individual judges and magistrates are even conscious of the implications of their own rulings. Do they ever pause to consider that when individual sentences contradict each other so wildly, it instantly translates into distorted and occasionally dangerous messages being imparted to us ordinary citizens down here in the real world?

No, I didn't think so either.

OK, I might not expect every single court decision to literally glisten with common sense, but... I do expect different judges (who are ultimately interpreting the same law, within the same parameters, in the same jurisdiction) to reach verdicts which at least reflect the same general legal principles.

Is that too much to ask? Evidently... yes, it is.

So in the space of just a few weeks, we have seen impossibly enormous contradictions between sentencing policy as it migrates from judge to judge and magistrate to magistrate. A woman gets imprisoned for three months over denying her estranged partner access to his 17-year-old son. A group of men gets fined 10 euros each for a serious case of assault and battery. A man is imprisoned for 12 years for possession of cannabis sativa; another man is conditionally discharged after thrashing his wife to within an inch of her life. Let's face it: we all know dozens of similar anomalies, so nothing new there.

But Magistrate Carol Peralta's reasoning in the now famous 'Mellieha ruling' simply takes the freaking biscuit. In fact nothing even comes remotely close for sheer irrationality alone. For one thing, the ruling directly implies that Malta's laws are subject to different interpretations, depending on where they happened to have been broken. Call a man 'gay' in Sliema, and there would be no reason whatsoever to apply any particular mitigating circumstances to the reaction... which means that if I were to respond to that 'provocation' by running someone over with my car, I would presumably get the full prison sentence I deserve.

React the same way in Mellieha, however, and one's background will combine with one's local sense of machismo, to produce an instant justification for a brutal act of pre-meditated attempted murder (according to the prosecution, the man was heard stating his intention to run him over, for crying out loud) that left the victim permanently disabled. Seriously, I shall have to consider changing my registered address to Mellieha. This way I can give vent to any amount of violent impulses, and when the police come knocking at my door, I'll already have an excuse up my sleeve: "He called me gay."

"Oh, that's all right then..."

But to be fair, none of this would be so irksome were it not for two other considerations. One: judges and magistrates in this country are appointed directly by the Justice Minister: they are not subject to any form of scrutiny, and the minister himself is not obliged to even explain the reasons for his choice. Two: the same judges can only be removed by a two-thirds majority in the House, which in practice means... NEVER.

Add to this the aforementioned issue of how political parties have poisoned the chalice of democracy to serve their own twisted interests, and it can hardly come as a surprise that every government since Independence has passed up an opportunity to reform the Constitution to address the inherent flaws in how judges are appointed, and also how the courts themselves operate - to address obviously glaring discrepancies in sentencing policies, for instance, or to contemplate changes which would improve the (at present ineffective) precedent system.

Speaking of the Constitution... might I ask what actually happened to the so-called 'President's Forum for Constitutional Reform"? I attended the first public seminar on the subject last January, and... well, apart from discussing the inclusion of even more archaic religious references than already litter that particular document (and apart from one or two very interesting suggestions by Prof. Ian Refalo, among others)... well, the whole thing sort of fizzled out, didn't it?

That's a pity, because - short of a local equivalent of the Arab Spring (which won't happen in my lifetime) - about the only thing which might even begin to address any of the above issues, and possibly rescue this country from the embarrassment of having to declare itself a failed State barely 50 years after Independence... would be a total system reboot of the entire Republic.

Never mind amending the Constitution... more like re-launching the entire project Malta from scratch: Constitution, Parliamentary procedure, modus operandi of the law-courts, the lot.

Any takers? I happen to have a couple of suggestions of my own, if anyone's interested...