Mr Justice and Dr Hyde

He's done it again, folks. The same magistrate who last year ruled that crimes committed in Mellieha should be subject to different interpretations of the law - on the basis that people from Mellieha are culturally more retarded than inhabitants of other towns and villages, and therefore cannot possibly be expected to understand such complex things as 'law' and 'order' - evidently felt his last judgment just wasn't insane enough to compete for an Oscar in the 'most bizarre ruling by a magistrate in a supporting role' category.

So Magistrate Carol Peralta has now single-handedly raised the bar on dotty sentences delivered by a Maltese court of law: declaring that 'foreigners' who commit petty crimes in this country will no longer be treated leniently, just because they are foreigners. They can now expect to go directly to jail, without passing Go and without collecting 200 dollars.

Oh, very good. So a magistrate in the criminal court has just casually informed us all that it has hitherto been customary for foreigners charged with criminal offences to be treated more leniently than Maltese citizens... just because of their nationality.

In case you don't believe me: here it is, straight from the honourable magistrate's mouth: "as from today, foreigners coming over to Malta and engaging in petty or serious crimes will be dealt with seriously, especially in the light of the fact that a great portion of those arraigned on theft are foreigners".

Magistrate Peralta significantly added that a petty crime becomes serious when the person or persons responsible for such acts "are individuals in a hospitable country".

Pardon my French, but... Quoi? Qu'est-ce que c'est? And... Voulez-vous coucher chez Frankuni?

You see, dimwits like myself have all along been under the impression that the real difference between a 'petty' and a 'serious' crime is that... um... the former is 'petty' in nature, while the latter is 'serious'. I mean, the two words do have meanings, you know... and these meanings do not change depending on whether the crimes they describe were committed by people with red, blue or green passports (or, for that matter, with no passports at all). 

Well, evidently I was mistaken. It seems that, in the Maltese jurisdiction, all it takes for a 'petty' crime to become 'serious' is for it to have been committed by a 'guest' in a host country. How interesting. Let's take this original thought process one step further, shall we? By the same stretch of the imagination, a 'serious' crime should become 'petty' when it is committed by the host against the guest. And oh look: that is precisely how Maltese justice works and has always worked... and not only have we never tried to disguise the blatant injustice, but we now have it inscribed in a court ruling for all posterity to marvel at.

From this vantage point, Peralta's logic suddenly no longer looks quite as extra-terrestrial as it did only a few seconds ago. I hate to say it, but... he's actually right, you know. It is demonstrably true, as Peralta so baldly declared in court last Thursday, that there are two codes of law currently operating in the Maltese legal landscape: one for locals, and another for that vast, shapeless swarm of insect life we so often refer to as 'third country nationals'.

Onto some examples now: starting with the teenie, weenie little detail that foreigners charged with criminal offences in this country are routinely denied bail because 'they might abscond'... while bail is routinely granted by the courts to even the most hard-boiled criminals charged with the most heinous crimes imaginable... so long as they are Maltese.

Peralta may be unaware of this fact - though I doubt it, seeing as he dishes out sentences in the criminal court himself - but foreigners account for almost two-thirds of the entire prison population, and most of them were never sentenced to prison at all. They are actually awaiting the commencement of their trial, having been denied bail on the basis that they are foreign.

But cases in which bail is denied to a Maltese suspect? Few and far between... so rare, in fact, that when it does happen it generally warrants a newspaper headline.

Meanwhile here's a practical example to chew over. The same court that initially denied bail to Daniel Holmes (a Welshman caught cultivating modest amounts of cannabis in his Gozo flat), and kept him in preventive custody for five years before sentencing him to 11 years and a €23,000 fine, saw no contradiction whatsoever in granting bail to a certain Dione Mercieca: a former Eddie Fenech Adami henchman who confessed to murdering his business partner by shooting him at point blank range in 2008.

And while some foreigners have had their passports confiscated to ensure they do not leave the country even if granted bail (I know of one such case right now)... Mercieca was not merely granted bail, but even allowed to travel on business trips without even the remotest concern that he might abscond. 

Then there are all those cases in which Maltese and foreigners are charged with the same crime, and not only is bail granted to the local but denied the foreigner... but the two cases are heard in different courts, so that one suspect (no prizes for guessing which) gets a trial by jury, complete with a possible maximum sentence of 25 years, while the other goes to the magistrates' court where he gets to face 10 years at the very most.

But all this is admittedly irrelevant at this stage. Peralta has decided that foreigners were getting let off lightly for years, and hey! He's a magistrate, while you and I are just little nobodies who must perforce bow to the superior wisdom of the judiciary.

All the same: we are left with two - possibly more - conundrums that just can't be hammered into any logical sense, no matter how you choose the look at the case at hand. One: Peralta first bemoans the leniency of the courts vis-a-vis petty crime committed by foreigners... and almost immediately proceeds to issue a SUSPENDED SENTENCE to a foreigner charged in his own court with a petty crime. Go figure...

But to be honest it's the second anomaly that has (rightly) captured the popular imagination. The implications of Peralta's ruling are that the blatant, naked and undisguised double standards our justice system so often applies between foreigners and locals is not the result of an oversight... a glitch in the system... a mistake which we all know to be wrong, but with which we have been saddled.

Oh no: it is now the official sentencing policy of the Maltese law courts to consider a foreign nationality as an aggravating factor that can automatically elevate a 'petty' crime to a 'serious' one... with all the implications this entails.

Which brings me to the truly scary aspect to what would otherwise be (let's face it) the stuff of comedy. OK, so we already know from past rulings that this particular magistrate is prone to this sort of thing anyway. And we also know that the underlying situation can't really be helped: no matter how blatantly and self-evidently unsuited to the job any given magistrate may turn out to be, our half-baked Constitution doesn't actually allow for the possibility of his or her removal... (other than by a two-thirds parliamentary majority which, in our politically immature country, is another way of saying 'never').

These issues are known to one and all, and they occasionally resurface as talking points to be discussed ad nauseam by such entities as the Chamber of Advocates, the Justice Reform Commission and others. But what about everybody else? What about the ordinary man in the street, who is so often on the receiving end of often equally absurd court decisions? Why does everybody just accept a situation whereby the rule of law - i.e., quite possibly the single most important aspect to any civilisation, without which we would be the ones risking our lives on the next boat to Lampedusa - is constantly threatened and undermined by the idiocies of a justice system that has evidently forgotten all about the 'justice' part of its own job description?

I don't know the answer myself, but (as usual) I think I can make a pretty damn cunning guess. I think it is actually the entire country - and not just its law courts or the occasional individual magistrate - that is so severely xenophobic, it simply no longer recognises injustices when the affected parties are not Maltese.

And there is a possibility (though I am the first to admit that this is cynical conjecture on my part) that this widespread sentiment may be exploited by certain institutions to boost their own flagging credibility or popularity at street level. In many cases, 'attacking the foreigner' is a deliberate, tried-and-tested ploy to instantly ingratiate oneself with a public that has been shouting its own xenophobia from the rooftops for years.

We have seen this time and again in the context of politics. Is your party going through a tough time? Has it just lost an election by a massive margin, and still doesn't know where it to even begin rebuilding its shattered image? Never fear, you can always win a few instant brownie points just by plugging into the national racist, anti-immigration sentiment... say, by insisting that those 120 Syrian asylum seekers rescued from certain death by the AFM this week should have been taken to Lampedusa, because (let's face it) we don't want any more filthy, pesky foreigners mixing with our nice Maltese children, thank you very much...

And just to round off the possibilities: maybe this same sentiment is actually correct all along. Who knows? Maybe the Maltese really are a special, magical race who should by rights be spared from the hassle of having to rub shoulders with (jaqq!) niggers, wops, chinks and all other such undesirables. And by this same reasoning... maybe we do deserve to be treated using a different yardstick from all other nationalities under the sun, and to be judged according to a different code of laws.

This, in a nutshell, is the ultimate wet dream of Malta's increasingly strident neo-fascist community. But like all wet dreams, the dreamer inevitably wakes up in the end... only to find that things have meanwhile got (how can I put this?) a little messy. 

In this case, the mess is created by the following, undeniable fact. Even if we accept all the above possibilities and more... it doesn't for a second change the fact that Malta has only one Criminal Code. And by its own legal definitions, this code is equally applicable to all human beings, regardless of the nationality inscribed in their passport.

[Note: before everyone jumps on me to point out that there ARE provisions in the law that apply differently to foreigners - those tend to be in the civil, not criminal, code].

Nor does any of the above alter the underlying principle upon which our entire justice system is supposed to be built: the one we all saw written on the walls of the Italian courts when following the televised 'maxi-processo' of Sicilian Mafiosi in the days of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Remember? 'La Legge E' Uguale Per Tutti'? ('The law is equal for all')?

Now: unless there was some small print in there that none of us ever noticed... possibly along the lines that "some nationalities are more 'uguali' than others"... that means that the justice meted out by Magistrate Peralta is also equal for foreigners in a Maltese court: and while I'm at it, for the entire population of Mellieha, too.

I guess no one ever got round to informing Magistrate Peralta, that's all.