Foreign minister aide’s derogatory comments come back to haunt him at the UN

Derogatory comments made to a freedom of speech advocate last December came back to haunt an aide of Foreign Affairs Minister Carmelo Abela at the United Nations yesterday when the issue was raised in a report presented by the UN Secretary-General to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The report documents alleged reprisals against victims as well as members of civil society and activists for their work in cooperating with the United Nations.

Malta’s case in point took place at a United Nations high-level event in Marrakech in December 2018, when aide Sandro Mangion took aim at activist Sarah Clarke, who at the time was working with PEN International, by calling her a “biased sh*th*le” over the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder case.

The Human Rights Council was told yesterday by Lucy Bye, on behalf of ARTICLE 19, where Clarke now works, and nine other freedom of expression organisations, including PEN International: “We are concerned that this reprisal forms part of a broader pattern of state-backed reprisals against human rights defenders, journalists, and the family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, in retaliation for their call for justice, in particular for an independent public inquiry into her assassination.”

The UN notes in its report that a public clarification and a private apology for the undiplomatic insult was later given by Mangion.

On 24 June 2019, some six months later, the Maltese government responded to the complaint, the UN heard yesterday.

At the event last December, Clarke had approached the Maltese delegation to ask for a copy of its conference statement. When asked what she thought of it, Clarke had told the delegation that, “The Government of Malta would have a lot more credibility when making a statement on the freedom of expression if it conducted a public inquiry [into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia].”

The Maltese delegation, however, accused her of spreading ‘false information’.

“They scoffed at me and told me I did not know what I was talking about,” after which Clarke informed them that she had been working on the case for the past year and had formed part of a freedom of expression delegation visiting Malta the previous October.

This, she said, was followed by more accusations, including a rebuke that that she had not spoken to the ‘right people’ in Malta during the visit.

Clarke informed both Minister Abela and Mangion that she had met Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, Justice Minister Owen Bonnici and the Attorney General Peter Grech.

Regardless, Clarke was still accused of being ‘biased’. Nevertheless, she pressed Minister Abela on whether he knew if the government was looking into who murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, to which the minister replied: “The family have full faith in the investigation.”

She said that this was far from true since the Caruana Galizia family had had to resort to the Constitutional Court to rectify the involvement of certain people in the investigation.

Clarke was then once again accused of being misinformed and biased.

While the Maltese delegation was walking out of the room, Mangion called her a “biased sh*th*le.” When asked whether she could quote his vulgar remark, Mangion, himself a former journalist, told her she could go ahead and “quote away.”

On his part, Mangion later said he had been upset at Clarke’s decision to use the high-level event to “launch unfounded claims” against the foreign minister in relation to the Caruana Galizia murder case.

He said he had apologised for the choice of words and insisted he was not referring to Clarke on a personal level but to the “unscrupulous network” that was feeding her unproven allegations.

“I think some context needs to be provided,’ Mangion said at the time. “Ms Clarke came to sit on one of the chairs reserved for Malta at the event and asked me for a copy of the minister’s speech, to which request I obliged. She then started launching accusations at Malta’s foreign minister. Each time he attempted to give a reply, she was not interested in listening and simply kept throwing back at him the same allegations,” Mangion said.

At one point, Abela rose from his seat and began to walk towards the exit to leave for the next appointment, with Clarke in tow.

“It was at that point that, as I felt she was acting in an inappropriate manner and that she should have engaged the minister outside, calmly, I uttered the words ‘biased’ and ‘sh*th*le’ in a low voice. I apologise profusely if any offence was taken, but I was certainly not referring to Sarah Clarke herself. I used those words to refer to the unscrupulous network by which she is obviously being fed unproven allegations that she kept parroting without having bothered to check her facts,” Mangion insisted.

“The foreign minister has never shied away from conversations of this kind - she could have sought a private conversation, if indeed she was interested in getting answers to her allegations,” Mangion said.

Yesterday’s report noted how Clarke was involved in the submission of a shadow report for the UN’s review of Malta by its Universal Periodic Review in October of last year, which included the Caruana Galizia case, and in which the editor of our Sunday edition, David Lindsay, had also been involved, along with Clarke.

The incident in Marrakech took place the following December.

“A public clarification and a private apology were later registered by the official,” yesterday’s UN report noted. But despite that, Malta was still named and shamed in yesterday’s report.

The report explained how on 24 June 2019, some eight months after the incident, the Maltese government had responded to the allegations, “indicating that the Maltese official’s reaction did not happen in isolation but was the direct result of what had transpired immediately before, when the official felt that the actions of Ms Clarke preceding his comments were undue and inappropriate.

“The government noted that the public official publicly clarified his comments and issued a private apology directly to Ms Clarke, offering his unreserved apologies and expressing regret for his choice of words and for having caused an offence.”

Her oral statement to the UN yesterday welcomed “the inclusion of Malta in the Assistant-Secretary General’s report on reprisals.”

“Last December, in an act of attempted intimidation, the delegation of Malta to the UN Global Compact on Migration verbally abused Sarah Clarke in response to her call for an international public inquiry into the assassination of Malta’s leading investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia.

“We are concerned that this reprisal forms part of a broader pattern of state backed reprisals against human rights defenders, journalists, and the family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, in retaliation for their call for justice, in particular for an independent public inquiry into her assassination.”

“Of particular concern,” she told the gathering, “are the ongoing defamation lawsuits that continue to be pursued posthumously against Daphne Caruana Galizia including suits backed by the Prime Minister and other senior officials; ad hominem attacks by government officials that Daphne’s son, Matthew, was involved in the assassination plot; and the daily destruction of a protest memorial calling for justice in her case, on the orders of the Minister for Justice.

“We urge the Council to monitor developments in this case, and in relation to reprisals against those advocating for a public inquiry, and to hold Malta to account should it fail to establish a truly independent and effective public inquiry, in accordance with the terms set out by the Council of Europe.”