Judge for yourself

Who would have ever guessed? Donald Trump, it seems, does have a soft white underbelly beneath that hardened, crusty exterior of his. Suddenly, the Presidential candidate who so roundly insulted and offended huge swathes of the world population – women, Muslims, Mexicans, the disabled, etc. – just can’t handle being insulted or offended himself. And this newfound sensitivity extends to his members of staff, too.

At the moment, for instance, there is some kind of brouhaha about some actors who gave Vice President Michael Pence something of a pounding from the stage at a theatre. Trump was aghast. ‘That shouldn’t happen!’ he tweeted, demanding an instant apology for the outrage. 

To be fair, he has a point: usually, actors are the ones getting booed by the audience, not the other way round. That said, I have yet to hear of an actor demanding an apology from the audience. Like most other people who perform their art (or work) in the public eye, actors have little option but to take it on the chin. The show must go on, and all that...

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was also mortally offended by some of the media coverage of the US election campaign. According to the Washington Post, he “met Monday with television news executives and some well-known TV journalists, and repeatedly told them that the campaign reporting about him was ‘unfair’ and ‘dishonest’.”

Got that folks? ‘Unfair’ and ‘dishonest’. And of course he is perfectly right. It’s terribly unfair of the media to report that around 90% of the things he said during the campaign were actually untrue. Such smear tactics only distract attention from all Trump’s more noble and inspiring campaign promises: for example, to get the Mexicans to pay for a wall designed to keep themselves out of America; or to introduce a register for Muslims, as America had last done for Japanese immigrants during WW2.

How unfair of the media to take advantage of innocent, harmless proposals like that. No wonder the President-elect was so upset. The dishonesty is truly appalling...

Ah well. I could have a lot more fun with all this... it’s kept me amused most of the weekend, to tell you the truth... but for a change I won’t add my voice to the chorus of shock and outrage and the man’s scarcely believable hypocrisy. 

Personally, I think it’s a good thing that President-elect Donald Trump has finally got in touch with his softer, more vulnerable side.  That he can finally empathise so keenly with the distress of a fellow human being... even if it is his own Vice President... fills me with hope for the future of humanity. After all, the world could use more of such heartfelt emotional outbursts, not fewer.

And in fact: hang on a minute, it seems to be catching on. Even as I write this article, news items continue to be uploaded, expressing the sudden newfound sensitivity of all sorts of other unlikely categories of people. Like the Maltese judiciary, for instance. No sooner were the latest judicial appointments announced, than Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri “warned against bashing and ridiculing judges and magistrates [...] as Labour’s former deputy leader Toni Abela and former Gozo party president Grazio Mercieca joined the judiciary.”

“Such remarks were unjustified,” he added; “it was not the first time that lawyers involved in politics had become members of the judiciary, and that such appointees had always kept their distance from party politics upon joining the bench.”

Yes, well, it’s not exactly the first time Malta’s system of judicial appointments has come in for heavy criticism, either. People have been complaining about it for years... and not just because of politics, either. The Noel Arrigo/Patrick Vella case is still too fresh in our minds. We have all experienced first-hand the possible consequences of a total collapse of public faith in the law courts. So just like the criticism levelled at Trump and Pence in the USA... it’s not coming from nowhere. 

But this is what makes Camilleri’s complaint interesting, The latest judicial appointments were made using a new and supposedly improved system. Judges and magistrates are no longer hand-picked directly by the Prime Minister, and they were until (literally) the day before yesterday; there is a new enrolment procedure which is vetted by a committee; if approved, candidates are passed on to Cabinet for the final ‘Man from Delmonte’ OK.

Which raises an interesting paradox. Why did we change the previous system, anyway? Part of the reason was surely to quell popular suspicion that judges were appointed primarily because of their political affiliation... with the result (among others) that, for all you know, the verdict you get from a Maltese court of law may have more to do with your own political leanings, than with the case itself.

I’ll admit that’s a bit of a bald way of putting it; but I have had my fair share of pacing up and down the law court corridors over the years; and that is precisely the sort of thing you hear over there. All the time. Even if unfair, it is still a widespread perception... and it was in part to rectify it that we changed the old system.

What was the outcome? Well, the first two judiciary members it produced are both former Labour Party officials. One of them was deputy party leader, the other the president of the PL’s Gozo section. And while the latter may have been low-profile (I for one had never heard of Grazio Mercieca, so I’ll take the opportunity to wish him luck) the former was high on the list of Nationalist targets at the last election, and pretty much ever since.

Dr Toni Abela also happens to have been my own lawyer in a recent criminal libel case... which gives me enough authority to confirm that the Chief Justice is probably right about him. Abela probably will be able to leave his own political baggage at the door when he checks into his new job. And he’ll probably make a pretty good judge, too.

But that doesn’t change two vital considerations. One, the Nationalist party now has one more reason (like it didn’t have enough already) to cry foul over apparent nepotism under Labour. If it were just Abela, this would seem particularly unfair... they’ve already claimed his scalp over the European Court of Auditors affair. But it isn’t just Abela. Before these latest appointments, the judiciary already included a former Labour Party whip and secretary, who was for years the editor of its main newspaper; a former Labour Party International Secretary  (and ace Super One reporter extraordinaire); the daughter of a former Labour Party deputy leader (and current Speaker of the House)... all appointed in the last three years, under a Labour administration. 

Add the latest two, and you almost have enough for a mini-shadow Labour Cabinet. ‘Il-Qorti Taghna Ukoll’, and all that...

Under those circumstances, complaints and scepticism are not only inevitable, but necessary. I myself have no reason to doubt any one of those people’s capabilities as judge or magistrate. But that is beside the point. The real problem is that, instead of dousing out the smouldering ashes of popular suspicion, we’ve just gone and emptied a jerry-can of petrol onto the flames. 

In a country where absolutely everything gets politicised sooner or later, these decisions simply open the floodgates of an electoral battle that is now almost certain to extend to the (previously unassailable) judiciary. We can expect (indeed we have already heard) complaints about possible political bias in the assigning of individual cases to particular judges; we will have (as on countless past occasions) more court decisions publicly questioned on political grounds... more cases spun wildly out of control by politically-motivated media...

...so even if the judges and magistrates do perform their duties to impeccable standards, the perception that the whole system is ‘rigged’ will continue to fester as before. The new system will have failed, and we will be back to square one.

But again: as with Donald Trump’s howls of protestation at legitimate criticism, the Chief Justice has a point. Bashing individual judges and magistrates (before they even hear a single case, in this instance) is hardly going to restore public confidence in an ailing justice system. Ideally, that process should come about as the result of a properly planned reform... of the kind we have only just managed to somehow botch.