The country with laid-back justice
It was Tim Sebastian who put a name to it. In his now notorious interview with Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne, Mr Sebastian interjected asides to show what he had come to understand of the situation in Malta in his preparation for the interview.
He did not say that Malta is a failed state or even that it is a Mafia state, as some have said. From his interjections one gets the impression that the renowned interviewer has concluded that Malta has a laid-back attitude to justice. “You make it up as you go along,” he said. We can confirm this by noting what happened since the interview. We had the extraordinary scenes in court where two magistrates were forced to withdraw themselves from the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder case because of either their friendship with the Caruana Galizia family or because the murdered blogger had written about them.
Everything was done legally, of course, but you will not find many countries with such a cavalier approach to justice.
Of course, the rule of law that many have taken to speak about also includes the due
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processes of law which include the right to appeal. But we also know of so many stories of criminals who have been let off with reduced sentences or even a reversal of a sentence through appeal.
This is all happening on top of a creaking legal system in which many times the hapless citizen faces an insurmountable task in seeking justice and redress. Cases in which an effort to retrieve what is due takes far too long, or the guilty person is never found at home or disregards court summons with no noticeable punishment or sanction being levied.
Successive governments have all striven to improve the justice system but we still face long delays and postponements in court cases, despite the increase in the numbers of magistrates and judges.
Visiting the Law Courts on any given working day, one might think that the entire police force is there. In fact, the inefficiency of the police force is another factor which encourages criminals to do whatever they have or want to do. We have had so many car bombs and murders, and yet only a tiny portion of those cases led to the arraignments.
In this latest case, the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination, it would seem that only the involvement of foreign investigators and the employment of advanced technology made the arraignments possible. Prior to that, the local forces of law and order were fighting the criminals with wooden swords.
And upstream from all this, the investigative forces are hampered by political pressure, given the always denied but always present dominion that politicians, the people in government, have over the police force. You may get some politicians who uphold the rule of law and who support the investigators in all that they do, but you get more either of politicians who try to take the place of the investigators or those who protect their allies and their sides through thick and thin.
Other countries too have their blind spots. But that is no alibi. On the contrary, being a small country with a very short history of independence, we are all too prone to pressures to play around with justice and with due processes. That is why the struggle is much more of an uphill one for us.