Transparency and accountability

We have observed, time and time again, how this government had campaigned in the last general election on a platform of transparency, accountability and the fight against corruption. That is extremely positive and we will continue to hold the government accountable for those pledges, which, so far, has been a hit and miss affairs with perhaps more misses than hits.

One such failure is the way in which the government has left the Permanent Commission Against Corruption completely by the wayside, where it has been languishing since last November. The official reason is that the Commission, set up in 1998, is due for a transformation after Judge Giovanni Bonello had labelled it as ineffective in his report on the reform of the judicial system. He reached that conclusion on the worthy merit that not a single person had ever been arraigned by the police on the basis of the Commission’s investigations, despite the fact that the Commission had investigated some 425 cases since it was established.

Bonello has proposed that the Commission’s role be given to a general prosecutor who would have independence from other institutions. This is all well and good, very well and good in actual fact, but one wonders how long the country will have to wait until that proposal is implemented on the ground.

In the meantime, the Permanent Commission Against Corruption has been basically dead and buried for the last eight months – not a good track record for a government that had made the fight against corruption its battle cry when in Opposition and during the last election.

Yes, there are valid reasons for reforming that Commission, especially considering the fact that its work had resulted in absolutely no prosecutions in some 16 years; but shouldn’t this government, while it sets about reforming its structure, at least have left the Commission in place, given it a new yet temporary lease on life and a new and improved mandate to perform its task until a new struc- ture has been set up?

It hasn’t, and in the meantime the Commission, which could otherwise be a vital tool in fighting corruption, is now inexistent. And, while the government drags its feet, citizens are still being deprived of this vital tool.

As an example, and purely for the sake of argument, assume that a citizen needs to make a formal complaint to the Commissioner of Police, whoever that might be, over a suspicion of corruption. Again, purely for the sake of argument, imagine that Commissioner withdraws criminal charges against the person in question not because he was legally entitled to do so but because of other motives.

Would that citizen then be able to lodge a complaint to the Police Commissioner to have the police to investigate the Police Commissioner over such a serious accusation? The answer is an obvious ‘No’, and that is where the Permanent Commission Against Corruption should come into play.

Although the Commission has been all but ineffective since it was set up, one would have expected far greater things from the Commission from this government given all that we were pledged. But as matters stand, there is not even a semblance of checks and balances in the system.

This government, when it was in Opposition, had also made the need for a Freedom of Information law a major point, but now that it is in power, this newspaper has had one request after another either unjustifiably turned down or completely ignored by those in power, perhaps in the hope that the issue being raised will just go away or in the vain hope that this newspaper will simply forget about it what with the daily barrage of news. We will not forget and we will hold the government to account each and every time it fails to respect the Freedom of Information law that it had campaigned for, as we have done elsewhere in today’s issue.

Finally, on the phone tapping campaign launched by this media organisation: while we find the fact that a number of prominent opposition Members of Parliament have declared themselves in favour of our call for the government to publish aggregate numbers of phone taps, or ‘interceptions’, carried out on a yearly basis heartening, we find the government’s attempts to brush those calls aside equally disheartening.

This week, the Prime Minister dismissed the call for the publication of the number of phone taps carried out because it would, as he put it, ‘undermine national security’. If that is indeed the case, why would other EU member states publish those figures? Are Malta’s national security considerations any different than those of, for example, Italy?

Moreover, the Prime Minister also sought to reassure the public that the number of phone taps carried out is ‘miniscule’ compared to the numbers he says are being mentioned by the media. This answer beggars belief when no media is in any kind of position to speak of the numbers in question for the very reason that those numbers have never been published.

The same goes for the home affairs and national security minister when, in reply to several parliamentary questions on the issue this week, repeatedly answered the Opposition leader to the effect that: ‘I would like to put the Opposition leader’s mind at rest that things are being done as they should be and within the ambit of the law regulating interceptions. I appeal to Dr Busuttil to ask such questions in the security committee, of which he is a member’.

But as was revealed yesterday by the Opposition, that security committee has not been convened since June of last year, and that the annual report on the Security Service’s operations is long overdue.

If the government is to live up to its pre-electoral mantras, it will have to put its proverbial money where its mouth is and begin to be more of what it had accused its predecessors of failing to be: transparent and accountable.