Press freedom index demotes Malta, without explaining why

It's disappointing to see Malta's press freedom index languishing in mid-league with Guyana. But the island's dramatic fall from a respectable 14th placing to 58th in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index for 2011 may be a questionable one, especially given the French organisation's lack of transparency on the ranking.

According the index, RSF (Reporters Sans Frontieres) demoted Malta from its joint fourteenth place with Belgium and Luxembourg in 2010, to 58th joining the ranks of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Guyana.

Anyone looking for a justification of this downgrading will be disappointed, because there is no explanation of how Malta has fallen in the ranks according to the criteria or questionnaire that RSF includes on its website.

While the Institute of Maltese Journalists has confirmed it had neither received nor provided the replies to the RSF press freedom questionnaire, all email requests to the RSF's press contacts keep bouncing back.

Even a critical assessment of Malta's present state of press freedoms - such as a freedom of information law still to be fully implemented (scheduled for June 2012); the unwieldy control on public information by ministerial gatekeepers; and the state's control of public broadcasting (at least by virtue of its political proximity to the PBS chiefs) - would still not deliver a high enough result in the RSF questionnaire to merit the island's downgrading.

On the other hand, the African nation of Cape Verde climbs up from number 26 to ninth position in RSF's press freedom index for 2011.

When however one looks at what Freedom House's description of press freedom looks like in Cape Verde - even though advanced by African standards - this pales into insignificance compared to Malta's press freedoms: Cape Verde's Constitution for example actually "excludes" the use of freedom of expression as a defence in defamation cases; government approval is needed to establish new newspapers and other publications; self-censorship is widespread among journalists; and many media outlets are actually state-operated.

On the other hand, Freedom of House ranks Malta 22nd (above Cape Verde's 27th), listing as shortcomings Malta's prosecution of offences against the Roman Catholic religion, criminal defamation, and the as-yet-to-be implemented freedom of information law.

As a Paris-based organization, RSF (Reporters san Frontieres) has come under criticism for receiving 18% of its funds from the French foreign ministry's French Development Agency and the International Organisation of the Francophonie.

In a detailed exposé, John Rosenthal writes that while RSF rankings are supposedly based on a questionnaire sent to a network of 130 correspondents, researchers and human rights activists, only this questionnaire is rendered public and not the responses or the organisations whose opinion has been surveyed. Also questionable is the way the raw data gets transposed into a score, which gave Malta such a massive demotion over the course of 2010 and 2011 where no significant incident of press restriction occurred.

Still, Malta does operate under a cloud of restrictive measures that can sometimes result in self-censorship for journalists.

Libel laws, and the ease with which allegedly injured parties can initiate proceedings, put undue stress on newspaper organisations which have to pay to file counter-claims, apart from the time-consuming and expensive legal procedures.

Limited circulation opportunities also mean advertisers are an important source of revenue, widening their power to limit their budgets when news reports are detrimental to businesses' interests.

And recent events in the past years where carnival revellers were prosecuted for the vilification of religion, remain a blemish on the standard of freedom of expression in Malta and whether it is as par with that upheld in the European Court of Human Rights.