Partisan DOI statements: Minister passes the buck to PN MPs
● Bonnici says Busuttil and Azzopardi are also high profile Opposition MPs
Justice Minister Owen Bonnici has passed the buck to two PN MPs after he was admonished by the Commissioner for Standards for “using the Department of Information in a partisan way.”
George Hyzler’s statement came after Bonnici issued a statement announcing that the constitutional court had turned down civil society group Repubblika’s application to stop the appointment of three judges and three magistrates.
The government statement also criticised Repubblika’s lawyers, MPs Simon Busuttil and Jason Azzopardi, for trying to stop the appointments notwithstanding that these were being made in accordance with the method of appointment in the Constitution that the two lawyers had voted in favour of, as members of parliament, a couple of years earlier.
In a statement, the Commissioner said Bonnici had not breached the Code of Ethics for MPs but said the minister would have been more in order had he omitted comments regarding Repubblika’s lawyers. Court cases belong to the litigants not the lawyers, and lawyers do not necessarily endorse the cause by representing a litigant, Hyzler said.
“These comments, which were intended to score political points, brought the statement dangerously close to crossing the line with regard to ethics.”
He reiterated the call he had made in that previous report for ministers to avoid using the DOI for statements of a partisan nature.
In comments to this newspaper yesterday, Bonnici said the PN MPs had made if difficult for him to distinguish between their roles as MPs and as lawyers in the case.
“First of all, the Commissioner did not find that I breached any ethics. He urged me to use more caution in the future. I would like to take the opportunity to set the record straight. We are not talking about lawyers in private practice here. Dr Hyzler understood that press release to be criticising particular lawyers in the case. Those two lawyers are high profile opposition MPs and the way they acted made it very difficult for me to distinguish between their role as advocates and their role as MPs.”
Bonnici said he had criticised Azzopardi and Busuttil, “in their public capacity as Members of the House who are also working as lawyers who are working on this case.”
“In fact, Dr Hyzler said lawyers should be more cautious and keep a distance between themselves from the case they are defending, and I believe they did not do that in this case.”
In his statement, Hyzler had said that, “lawyers active in politics, even more than lawyers in general, should be particularly sensitive to the peril of seeking publicity for the cases they participate in, since this would fuel the perception that they identify with the case”.
Minister Bonnici said yesterday that all this shows that the Commissioner for Standards was needed in Malta.
“I believe that these are steps in the right direction to keep improving the way we operate.”
In his statement on Tuesday, the Standards Commissioner pointed out that this was the second time a minister was being warned not to use the DOI for partisan purposes. A few weeks ago he had issued a similar statement concerning a press release issued by Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi.