Protest against the establishment? You must be bonkers...

Bonkers. I’ve always loved that word. Let’s face it, anything that starts with a bonk can’t be half bad. (Provided that the bonk is consensual, of course. And that it doesn’t result in the accidental conception of the Anti-Christ, or anything like that.) 

Strangely, however, such an evocative and emphatic word is rarely ever used as anything but an insult. And nowhere more frequently than in Malta: where even the concept of ‘bonker-ness’ itself (bonker-dom? Bonker-tude? Bonker-anity?) is occasionally extended to perfectly ordinary, everyday pursuits.

Like protesting against the authorities, for instance. Never mind that protesting is, in itself, a fundamental human right (actually, a composite of several such rights: freedom of expression, association, the right to a fair and equitable justice system, and so on). In the local context, actually exercising any of those rights would be considered every bit as insane as claiming that you are Lucifer or Napoleon Bonaparte... or, to give a more detailed example: believing that the act of masturbation, wherever it is performed in the world, has the effect of sapping the virtuous of their moral strength; so entire lamaseries full of Tibetan monks are paid to masturbate furiously each day, for the express purpose of corrupting your own virtue... 

That, by the way, is an actual, documented, real-life psychotic delusion, suffered by French actor/stage director Antonin Artaud in the 1920s. Now, most would agree that Artaud was, in fact, completely bonkers.  (He was also known to routinely accost passers-by in the Luxembourg Gardens with the outrageously hilarious demand: ‘Sir, the world has done me much harm. You are part of the world, therefore you have harmed me. Give me 5 francs!’)

But who’s to say, really? I certainly never made it my business to find out what goes on in the private quarters of Tibetan monasteries. So how can I, hand on heart, confidently assert that Antonin Artaud was WRONG to believe what he believed?

Then again, I haven’t spent years studying and practising clinical psychiatry, either: which places me in the same category as those policemen who, in 2014, decided that a man must clearly be a lunatic, because he staged an impromptu protest outside Castille. And a dangerous lunatic, too: they even tried to get him committed, which (in this day and age) is only supposed to ever happen in cases where the patient poses a danger to himself or others.

On what basis did they reach any of those medical conclusions, I wonder? Last I looked, the minimum requirements to become a policeman in this country were three passes at Ordinary GSCE level. The minimum accepted pass-mark is a ‘D’. Yet there they all were, eagerly jumping to conclusions about the state of a man’s mental health... where even a veteran psychiatrist, with years of training and experience under his belt, would have hesitated to pronounce a diagnosis. Amazing, the advances we’ve made in secondary school education...

But let’s go over the known facts again. This week, the Constitutional Court ruled that a certain Nicholas Busuttil’s fundamental rights had been violated by the police, when they: a) arrested him for staging a peaceful, one-man protest outside Castille; b) referred him for a psychiatric evaluation; c) rejected the first professional advice they were given, and sent him directly to Mount Carmel Hospital to be examined by another doctor; and d) had him temporarily committed, until he was discharged following a third evaluation.  

By my count, that’s quite a few assumptions being made there. Not all of them concern psychiatry, either. In fact, you don’t even have to proceed beyond point (a) to encounter the first of many major problems. On what grounds was he even arrested? There was nothing in his behaviour that suggested a public disturbance; he didn’t violate any laws concerning public assembly. All he did was affix a sign to his car with the words: ‘MEPA ma timxix ma kullhadd l-istess’ [MEPA does not treat everyone the same way’]

The official charge, by the way, was ‘obstruction of traffic’ – when he plainly wasn’t obstructing anything at all... except maybe the rosy view the police want us all to have of the benevolent Maltese state, and all its immaculate apparatus. Viewed from that angle: yeah, I suppose he was kind of standing in the way. But that only takes us back to all those fundamental rights I mentioned earlier. If they exist at all, it is precisely to allow people to obstruct a perception with which they disagree, and which others are trying to impose on them.

Other problems immediately arise. One, what Nicholas Busuttil did was effectively no different from what countless other people do at all times, each and every single day. Standing in a public space and blaring out a message is not exactly unheard of in Malta, or anywhere else in the world. In most other contexts we would refer to it as ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’. In fact, I am writing this at a time when the doughnut van is usually heard approaching from a good three miles away: ‘Hawn Tad-Doughnuts! Friksi u sbieh! Ara xi gmiel ta qannec doughnuts...!’  over and over again for the rest of the afternoon. 

That, of course, is considered perfectly ‘sane’ behaviour... even if it drives everybody else up the bleeding wall. But had the message been: “PA employs two weights and two measures! Look, how fresh and enticing PA’s  different weights and measures are!”...  well, I guess the doughnut man would have to be arrested, too. For the grave crime of, um, telling the truth too loudly...

This brings us to a second problem. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of whether the doughnut man’s doughnuts are indeed as beautiful and erotic as he makes them out to be over his five million megawatt speaker.  But there can be no denying that the message imparted by Nicholas Busuttil (at considerably less disturbance to others) was 100% accurate. In fact, I would argue that it is those who disagree with Busuttil who need to have their heads examined. And I would argue it convincingly, too... if only such people actually existed.

Recently we have been regaled with a veritable bonanza of evidence that the PA (as MEPA is now known) employs a different yardstick to different types of planning applications/infringements. Busuttil’s case concerned an enforcement order over an irregular change of use from garage to car-wash. Well, other people have built entire villas without permits, or added entire storeys to their hotels or apartment blocks, only to have their irregularities benevolently sanctioned by means of an umpteenth amnesty.

So not only was Nicholas Busuttil arrested (illegally, as far as I can make out) for behaviour which is perfectly acceptable in any other context... but he was automatically judged to be suffering from a mental health disorder, for pointing out something which is self-evidently true. The implications would be borderline laughable, if they weren’t so appalling. Telling the truth about our country’s institutions, it seems, has become symptomatic of mental illness. Along the lines of a ‘pathological liar’... only, um, the other way round. Honesty is the new pathology. We are rewarded for buying into a lie, and regarded as insane for daring to state the facts as they really are.

And that’s just the start of it. I am pleased to note that Mr Justice Joseph Zammit McKeon went straight for the jugular in his written ruling. “This court hasn’t the slightest doubt that the way the police reacted to the behaviour of the applicant had exceeded every acceptable limit in a democratic society where fundamental human rights are not only respected but should find the protection they merit in their application.”[...] “It is clear that the police wanted to find an excuse to stop him from expressing his grievance at all costs.”

Yet this is not the first time that the police have made it abundantly clear that their primary duty is to protect State institutions – and sometimes even private entities – from legitimate complaint or criticism by the public. Just a few weeks ago, they turned out in full force to help the leaseholders of Manoel Island prevent another perfectly legal protest from taking place. On that occasion I suppose it would have been slightly too much to refer dozens of protestors (including the Gzira mayor, and at least one political party leader) to Mt Carmel Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. But had it been a lone, random protestor like Nicholas Busuttil? He’d probably have been carted off in a straitjacket...

Zammit McKeon is perfectly right: this is utterly unacceptable in a democratic society. But this only raises the question of why we continue to accept it. The Constitutional Court may have helped a little by pointing out the glaring injustice in a ruling: but by handing Busuttil the paltry sum of €2,000 in compensation, it also underscored the sheer extent of the same injustice.

For all the Court’s big words about the need to protect human rights, it didn’t actually do all that much to protect them when it had the chance. The compensation figure sets a market price for all human rights violations... not just Busuttil’s. It tells us how much the Court considers our collective fundamental human rights to actually be worth, when it comes down to pounds, shillings and pence.

No, I didn’t think it was very much either. Especially when there doesn’t seem to be any corresponding penalty for the ones found guilty of the human rights violation. But once again: who’s to say? Maybe that’s how much human rights really are worth in Malta. Less than a second-hand Mazda...