Schengen mismanagement

In my last article, I wrote about Malta’s mismanagement of its Schengen border with Italy: Customs officials inspect people who cross this internal border as if it were an external border.

They don’t inspect each and every person. But they do inspect nonetheless. Randomly. Which isn’t what Schengen is about.

Schengen means that people can cross internal borders as if there were no border – except when there’s reasonable suspicion to believe that the law is being broken. In the absence of reasonable suspicion (or intelligence), States party to the Schengen Agreement have no right to treat travellers as if they were crossing a frontier.

Schengen means a huge, frontier-less common market, in which people and goods can move freely.

For a moment I thought that on this island floating in splendid isolation, I was the only one who saw things this way. Then I discovered that the island’s highest judicial organ shares my viewpoint.

In a decision delivered last year (App. Ċiv. 94/09/1), the Court of Appeal confirmed what the Court of First Instance had said on the matter. Let me quote (I shall translate from the Maltese original).

The Court of First Instance said: “It transpires that people entering Malta’s harbour from a Member State of the European Union […] were automatically subjected to inspections by Customs officials, on the sole basis that they were coming from another country, and not because the Customs officials had a reasonable suspicion that those people were importing products subject to excise duty for commercial purposes [emphasis made by the Court]. The Court considers that the practice of obligatory inspections by Customs officials runs counter to the freedom of movement of goods within the European

Union.”

The Court of Appeal confirmed the First Court’s analysis: “A proper understanding of the provisions of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union as found in the judgments of the European Court of Justice necessitates finding all customs controls on importation in the form of systematic inspection controls or stopping of vehicles as constituting a measure equivalent to a quantitative restriction for the purposes of articles 34 and 35 of the TFEU. […] Customs laws have to be treated like tax laws and therefore interpreted in a restrictive manner. […] Unless there are good enough reasons to justify the imposition of restrictions, the market has to be completely free.”

It added: “The right given to Customs officials to stop vehicles or to examine and search inside vehicles […] depends on the possibility that anything found in such vehicles can be confiscated after a search warrant is obtained or if there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that such goods can be confiscated.”

And then, the final blow, demonstrating that, unlike the Customs Department, our Courts understand how Schengen works. It said: “This Court cannot agree with the argument that the good have to be treated like the bad [mal-ħażin jeħel it-tajjeb] or that everybody is to be treated a priori as if they were guilty. [Furthermore,] the foremost rule of free movement of goods within the European Union can be put aside only in exceptional cases.”

There you have it. From the top court in the country, in a judgment delivered last year, on July 21. It makes the same argument I made a couple of weeks ago, after what I witnessed at the harbour. I witnessed exactly the same practices denounced by the Court.

The implications are manifold. First of all it means that our Customs Department is behaving in a way that is completely outof-synch with the rest of Europe. It means that we’ve joined the European Union and the Schengen Agreement but Malta fails to function as a proper EU Member State.

Second, it means that either the European Commission is fast asleep, or couldn’t care less about tiny Malta and the lack of respect for EU law in the smallest EU Member State, or else that the Commission has drawn the attention of the Maltese Government to this improper behaviour and the Maltese Government simply ignored whatever the Commission had to say.

Third, it means that Malta is really going through institutional meltdown. All the talk about “let the institutions work” is just hot air. If indeed the executive organ of the State were allowing the other organs to work, then the Customs Department would have heeded the implicit advice found in the judgment I’ve just quoted.

Let’s be clear. The Court cannot do more than decide a case that’s brought before it – the Court cannot inspect and enforce the law. That’s not its job – that’s the job of the executive organ of the State.

When it comes to the implementation of the Schengen Agreement in Malta, it’s evident that the executive organ of the Maltese State has not understood the philosophy behind the Agreement and, to add insult to injury, it stubbornly refuses to understand it even when it is explained to it in very clear terms by the judicial organ of the State.

If this is how “institutions work” – then the institutions don’t work. The Courts explain the law in individual cases and apply it in those cases – but that explanation applies to all cases. It’s then up to the Executive to have the common sense to apply the legal reasoning of the Court to all cases. Because it’s simply absurd even to think that all

cases should end up before the Courts!

Why should I even be writing things that are so plainly obvious? Isn’t it obvious that what the Court decided in App. Ċiv. 94/09/1 applies all the time?

Why does the Maltese State persist in ignoring the correct interpretation of the law?

And, mind you, the Maltese Court was quoting the European Court of Justice – meaning that this isn’t just the Maltese judicial interpretation: it’s the European

judicial interpretation!

Why does the Maltese State need to be so ignorant, backward, and out-of-synch with the rest of Europe?

They’re fixated on abortion

The fault is not only of the State. The so-called “Fourth Estate” – the (free) Press – shares the responsibility for Malta as a dysfunctional EU Member State.

Quite a few journalists are busy getting on their hobbyhorse, ignoring more urgent issues. They’re high on their pro-abortion agenda, as if abortion is what this country urgently needs, instead of doing their duty as the Fourth Estate and keeping the Executive on its toes with regard to its obligations as the government of an EU Member State.

And let’s be frank. All this insistence on the supposed right of women to kill their babies… they are using borderline, uncommon medical cases as an excuse. Who do they think they’re fooling? They’re using such medical cases to push forward the abortion-ondemand agenda. Essentially, they crave for the right to kill one’s own unborn children as an act of the will, granting women the right of life and death.

The vast majority of abortions that take place elsewhere aren’t due to medical complications or rape – they’re due to adultery or “family planning”, or reckless behaviour. Some women who resort to abortion have psychological problems. Others aren’t thus burdened, but prefer killing their own child than facing the consequences of an affair, or simply don’t want to become mothers. This in the age of reliable contraception, which is easy to acquire and easy to use.

Some of those who advocate the right to kill unborn children speak of careers. They will ask, Why should a young person sacrifice their career for parenthood?

My answer is: What career are you talking about? Very few people – men or women – have a career. The vast majority – I would say 80% of us – have full-time jobs that allow us to pay the bills and enjoy one or two free evenings a week.

A career means getting a top management post or joining the top people in your profession. How many achieve this? Very few. For the rest, it’s the humdrum of everyday life, working just for the bills and perhaps one or two holidays a year. And for this you want to sacrifice your child at the altar of an illusory career?

Remember tomorrow. When you’re 50, who’s going to give any meaning to your life? Your dreadful job or your children? Don’t let them fill your heads with lies and silly dreams. Unless you’ve got it in you to work your backside off like there’s no tomorrow, you’re not going to have a career.

A career means 80-hour weeks. It means having such grit that you don’t care about any work/life balance because your work is your life.

How many people aspire to such a lifestyle?

Only a few – and those few are those who get to the top, who have a career, who live the loneliness of the long-distance runner. For the rest, it’s just a job. So educators who fill the heads of youngsters with airy-fairy dreams should contain themselves, and keep to the truth.

And then there’s all that nonsense about patriarchy – that mysterious word which seems to imply that the world is run by men for men. This is utter hogwash. Twenty-first century Europe and America allow all individuals – men and women – the same opportunities. There’s no discrimination – and if some shred of discrimination does survive, there are enough legal remedies to eliminate it completely.

Patriarchy is a figment of certain people’s imagination; the reality is different.

Women have made it to Parliament on their own steam. We have women in the judiciary. Top positions in the European Union are occupied by women. Women are leaving their mark in business and the professions. There are probably more females studying at tertiary level than there are males. In other words, all this nonsense about patriarchy is just that: nonsense.

But then, there’s no achievement without sacrifice. Arnold Schwarzenegger – who reached the top in bodybuilding – once said something quite intelligent: If you want to reach the top, you’ve got to work hard. While the others are partying, you’ve got to go to the gym and work out. Be focussed: no distractions.

If you want to have a career, don’t fool around. Don’t listen to the ideologically-motivated advice given by radical feminists. If you want a career, work hard and avoid having to kill your unborn child.

Because, despite all the pseudophilosophy dished out by radical feminists, that “bunch of cells” is your child.

Unless you believe in magic, that is, and you believe that a “bunch of cells” magically becomes a human being at some vaguely-defined moment in time.

But then if you believe in magic, you might just as well believe that you can magically have a career while partying or fooling around.

Yet, the truth is that fairy tales are nothing more than what their name says.