Gods and monsters

So that’s how you do it. That’s how you get the law courts to finally pull their socks up, and start deciding individual cases within entirely reasonable timeframes… such as, anything less than two centuries minimum.

I have often pondered what measures might be taken to expedite the judicial process in this country. And I’m not the only one, it seems. At one point, something called a ‘Justice Reform Commission’ even published a report the size of The Encyclopaedia Galactica on the subject: following extensive public consultation, and all that.

Yet despite claims of modest success, the experience of anyone who’s actually facing proceedings in court suggests that nothing has really changed at all. Things still drag on interminably, as they have always done before. Judges and magistrates are still swamped by improbable caseloads; hearings are still endlessly deferred for various inane reasons… and you can still tell you’ve spent a morning in court by the amount of cobwebs you have to dust off your clothes afterwards.

Unless, of course, you happen to be Jason Azzopardi… in which case, a judicial process that might take anywhere up to 15 years to reach closure, will suddenly find itself all neatly wrapped up (in your favour, too) in no less than 15 days.

Fifteen days! That’s the time it normally takes for the prosecution just to read its opening statement… let alone for an entire case to be whizzed through all its stages: conveniently leaving out all the long, boring ones, of course... like, for instance, the ones in which witnesses actually testify.

Who needs witnesses, anyway? Much easier for the magistrate to simply decide that, in his opinion, ‘Azzopardi did not intend to insult [Peter Paul] Zammit’…’ and that’s it. Case dismissed.

Damn: if all magistrates worked the same way, that backlog I mentioned earlier would be down to zero in no time at all. Can my case be decided that way, too? Or do you have to be a member of Parliament, for the magistrate to simply wave aside all other opinions in the matter, and decide the case before anyone has even had the chance to testify?

But the question on everyone’s lips (everyone, that is, whose analogous court case has been dragging on since prehistory) is this: what is the secret of Jason Azzopardi’s success? How did the Shadow Justice Minister manage to solve a problem that has so far eluded the country’s greatest legal minds? 

Let’s see now. Judging by how that case was actually handled, I’d say that the “Azzopardi method to expedite justice” involves two steps. First, you bring together a loud, unruly mob to protest outside the law courts on the day of your arraignment. You know, just to remind the Court of the sort of ‘trouble’ it would be inviting, if it were to reach a verdict that was, let’s say, ‘inconvenient’. At the same time, you drum up as much noise as you can through your private media empire.

A brilliant idea, I must concede. Why didn’t I think it up for myself? 

Well, one possible reason is that I would almost certainly be arrested if I tried pulling a similar stunt… as would anyone else who is not Jason Azzopardi, or any of his colleagues on either side of the House. This is, after all, a country where harmless environmentalists get arrested for organising a picnic on a roundabout… despite conducting their protest with far more civility. And there are still laws, dating back to Mintoff’s time, against spontaneous gatherings of more than 10 people without a police permit.

Laws like that, however, only apply to ordinary nobodies like you, me and those environmentalists who got interrogated by the police. If you’re the man who might be calling all the shots at the law courts in a couple of years’ time… it seems that the rules are suddenly quite different. 

That, by the way, was just step one. The second step is to get your political partners in Europe to kick up a godawful fuss about ‘democracy being under threat’. 

This one is particularly ingenious, because it also indirectly illustrates just how very wide the gulf between ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ mortals really is. On one level, the European People’s Party was perfectly right to diagnose Malta’s criminal libel and slander laws (yes, there is a difference but it doesn’t amount to much) as ‘undemocratic’. In both concept and application, these laws are routinely used to gag freedom of expression in Malta. Anyone who works in the media will attest to this: many have themselves been sued for slander and libel, often as not by Azzopardi’s own parliamentary colleagues (if not by Azzopardi himself).

Strangely, however, the European People’s Party never spoke out about this ‘threat’ before. It never voiced any concern over any of the other Maltese citizens who have faced similar or identical charges to the ones levelled at Azzopardi over the years. These were all ‘European people’, too… and Malta has been an EU member state since 2004. Yet the only time the EPP awoke to the existence of this ‘threat’ was last week… when one of its own members was affected.

Hmm.  How very alike all political organisations eventually start looking, when you eventually start looking at them. 

In any case, there you have it: Jason Azzopardi’s guide to reforming the justice system, in two simple steps. Guaranteed to work every time, of course. But it works particularly well when you are on the receiving end of the sort of criminal action you would have no hesitation initiating yourself. 

Ah, well, I guess that’s why they call him the ‘Shadow Justice Minister’. Not a shadow of justice anywhere to be seen…

As for the rest of us, down here on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder… neither step is actually available. Oh, sure, we could all try to intimidate the courts by shouting and stamping our feet on its doorstep, under the noses of the police… just see how far that would get you. But few among us can precipitate an international media storm just by snapping our fingers. You have to be propped up by a party with international affiliations for that.

What this also means is that Evarist Bartolo was right, when he spoke – in a different context – about ‘laws for gods’ and ‘laws for animals’. I am unfamiliar with the actual Roman proverb he was quoting there… but it is undeniable that justice works in different ways, when the people to whom it is meted fall into the ‘god’ category.

Azzopardi was just one example. Other, equally unpalatable ones abound. 

Starting with the one Bartolo was actually talking about. It is not just the law courts that apply different weights and measures for ‘gods’ and ‘animals’; the country’s fiscal authorities have likewise handled the Panamagate case with far less zeal than they would show a lesser mortal with unanswered tax questions. 

It reminds me of the classic Mastercard ad. “Being a Cabinet Minister and the OPM’s chief of staff? Priceless. For everyone else, there are money laundering laws…”

But the most blatant one of the lot also occurred this week. It’s a bit complicated, but I’ll try and keep things as simple as I can. Zurrieq’s former mayor, Ignatius Farrugia, was recently sentenced to four days’ imprisonment for ‘harassing’ a certain Daphne Caruana Galizia, blogger, at a festa a couple of years ago… 

What? No, I didn’t get that the wrong way round. Ignatius Farrugia really was the one found guilty of ‘harassment’. It is but one of many ironies ignited by Ignatius there… but let us stick (as with Azzopardi) to the question of how the case actually panned out in the end. 

It transpired that the sentence had been handed down in error – the crime of harassment isn’t punishable by prison at law – and, as has so often happened in the past, we were simultaneously reminded that there is no actual legal remedy available for this sort of miscarriage of justice. 

The only solution? A Presidential pardon. And again: in a case with clear political connections, the judicial process suddenly warped into light speed. Lesser mortals who find themselves behind bars usually have to apply for a Presidential pardon; their application is then subject to scrutiny by an advisory board, which goes on to recommend a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the President’s office. The process can take months… during which the applicant remains in prison the whole time. 

Not in this case, however. In this case, the Presidential pardon was granted almost automatically.

OK, I won’t begrudge Ignatius his good fortune; it seems there genuinely was a mistake in the sentence… and we genuinely do not have any other way of getting wrongly convicted people out of jail. But why only this case? Why are Presidential pardons only ever issued to patch up leaks and holes in our judicial system? 

In recent years there have been two conspicuous requests for Presidential pardons on purely humanitarian grounds, and both were denied. To take the most recent first: Godfrey Ellul, a 67-year-old man dying of lung cancer, who has already served two-thirds of his sentence, wants to be released early so he can live his final days under house arrest instead of in jail. It doesn’t seem an entirely unreasonable request, does it? In fact, it is the sort of request that often does result in a pardon (or equivalent) in any humane judicial system, anywhere. 

In Malta, however, Ellul eventually got to learn that his application had been turned down – after several weeks awaiting a reply – on the TVM news. No reason given. Though Malta technically lacks the death penalty, he was nonetheless sentenced (without appeal) to die in jail.

That’s a “law for animals” right there, if I ever saw one. 

The other case was that of Daniel Holmes: imprisoned for 12 years for an offence which has since been decriminalised… and for which other people have been sentenced to far less. Once again, the request for a Presidential pardon was turned down, with no reason given. And in other news, a rogue oil trader who was directly implicated in a major government corruption scandal… 

Ah, but we all know that already. Gods and animals, did I say? Gods and monsters, more like it…