Prison in uproar over Chief Justice appointment

Dr Camilleri was this week nominated to fill the post vacated by Dr Vincent de Gaetano, who was in turn appointed to replace Giovanni Bonello as judge on the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Camilleri will become the second former public prosecutor to occupy the role of Chief Justice (who also presides over the Court of Criminal Appeal) in recent years.

Like his immediate predecessor de Gaetano – formerly a public prosecutor in the AG’s office – Camilleri will also have to abstain from the Court the Criminal Appeal in any case where his office would have prosecuted.

But unlike de Gaetano, Camilleri was appointed Chief Justice directly from the post of AG without any intermediary phase as a sitting judge.

In practical terms, this means that he will have to abstain from the Court of Criminal Appeal altogether, as his office would have been directly involved in most, if not all, of the original cases currently awaiting appeal.

However, this precaution alone has not placated suspicions that Camilleri’s appointment will undermine any chance of existing convictions being overturned at appeals stage.

“It doesn’t matter if the Camilleri himself abstains,” was the comment of one particular inmate. “He will still be responsible for the Court of Appeal, and this will surely influence the way the other judges decide their cases. How can they rule that the prosecution had been wrong, when their own boss was the chief prosecutor?”

As an example, they cite the recent case of Clayton Galea, a 25-year-old man whose conviction for drug trafficking was overturned on appeal after de Gaetano ruled that the AG had presented ‘incorrect facts’ as evidence.

“Can you imagine the Appeals Court ruling like that now, when the same man who made a mess of the original case has now been promoted Chief Justice?”

Another claimed that with decisions such as these, the system was consistently being ‘loaded’ in favour of the police and against convicted prisoners.

“The police are in control of everything. They put us in prison, they guard over us while we are in prison, and now the former AG – who is the police’s legal advisor – gets to decide on his own previous cases. How can this even be legal?”

Elsewhere, the decision to appoint Camilleri as Chief Justice has also come under fire by Norman Lowell, leader of the far right party Imperium Europa, who is appealing against a two-year sentence, suspended for four years, on racism charges.

Commenting in an online forum, Lowell denounced outgoing Chief Justice de Gaetano’s “shameful passing of the buck” to Camilleri, who as prosecutor started proceedings against him: “the very man who ignored two Judicial Protests… regarding the blatant breaking of the Electoral Law where five scoundrels stole an Election and made mockery of our democracy,” he added.

‘Schizophrenic role’

Even before Camilleri’s appointment to Chief Justice, questions had long been raised about the apparently ‘schizophrenic’ role of the Attorney General.

In an interview with MaltaToday in 2008, former ECHR judge Giovanni Bonello described the AG office in paradoxical terms.

“In Malta we follow the British system, which appoints the same person as both Attorney General and chief prosecution officer,” he begins. “As systems go, you could almost call it schizophrenic. The first office is that of government’s legal advisor. The second is a supposedly independent prosecutor. This means that every day, these people have to change hats around 15 times at least.”

Bonello goes on to observe: “You can’t be subordinate one minute, then independent the next.”

In Malta, however, it appears that one can easily be prosecutor, gaoler and Appeals Court judge, all in the space of a single career.