The Justice and Home Affairs Minister has hatched another bright idea. Victims of violent crimes will be paid up to Lm10,000 in compensation by the government. This is nuts, because the government has no relationship whatsoever with the victims of violent crimes, and there is no basis for the paying of compensation for crimes which it did not commit.

The government might be considered liable for the payment of compensation if, for example, it went out and mugged an old lady, leaving her half dead, or if the victim was subjected to violent crime because of his or her work for the government. But what are we talking about here? A coked-out thug shoots a shopkeeper for his takings, and the government pays the shopkeeper Lm10,000 for a crime committed by somebody else. In other words, the government has taken on the role of insurer, and we don’t need to pay any premiums or take out a policy.

I know that the minister is supposed to be one of Malta’s great legal minds, but I just can’t understand the workings of it. It’s all very well to boast about how generous the government is going to be with the victims of crimes it didn’t commit, but quite frankly, the government has no money to call its own. It doesn’t make any money, and it doesn’t earn any money. It only takes money. If anybody is going to be paying the victims of violent crime, it’s the taxpayer.

I don’t like this business of the government giving money to victims of crime. It introduces alien concepts into the regular understanding of law and order. Maybe the minister reasons it out this way. Given that it is the state which prosecutes violent criminals, then it should be the state which compensates their victims. It doesn’t make any sense at all to me, but then I don’t have a great legal mind and I might very well be missing something important there.

In any case, the state and the government are far from being the same thing, though the government is confused about this and thinks like the Sun King did: l’etat c’est moi (I am the state). When Jesmond Mugliett cooked up that qassata some weeks ago, the government emphasised that it wasn’t protecting the crooked driving examiners, because the Attorney General had appealed for a harsher sentence. This is all very well, but the Attorney General doesn’t represent the government. He represents the state. The Attorney General’s office is not part of the government. Quite the contrary – it is autonomous, so autonomous that it can prosecute the Prime Minister and even the Justice Minister.

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I am very far from being in love with the idea that Slasher can maim somebody, put him in Intensive Care for two months, and the tax-payer will fork out for Slasher’s violence. It’s bad enough that the taxpayer has to pay to have Slasher prosecuted, pay to keep him in prison, and pay for his victim to get the proper treatment in the state hospital, without also having to pay compensation to the victim.

Isn’t this pushing things too far? This compensation business introduces the rather odd idea that the government is somehow responsible for the bad behaviour of its citizens, and must pay for the consequences of those citizens’ actions. Exactly why, I can’t understand. The victims of non-violent crimes can suffer equally badly. Those who have had their homes worked over and their personal possessions strewn about and stolen are often traumatised. But the victims of household robbery and other attacks on the home are expected to be covered by insurance. If they’re not, and criminals strike, then it’s bad luck to them, and so it should be. The government is not our default insurer.

Equally, if we get run over by a drunken driver, it’s his insurer that will pay us compensation, and if it turns out that he hasn’t paid his premium, then we will have to take him to court and spend years trying to get a decision on compensation in a civil suit. Again, nobody expects to knock on the government’s door and get money for being run over by somebody who’s had too many alcopops before driving. Yet if somebody knocks you over the head with a sledgehammer and leaves you for dead, you’re in line for a cash hand-out from the government. Why? I imagine it’s because you can’t insure yourself against getting knocked over the head with a sledgehammer. Well, yes, you can actually. There’s a wide variety of insurance policies you can take out that will give you a sizeable sum if you end up incapacitated or disabled, and an even more sizeable sum goes to your heirs if you pop it.

Try as I might, I can’t understand the logic or the rationality behind this latest hair-brained scheme from the Justice Minister. Giving away taxpayers’ money to victims of violent crime, crusading for Gift of Life, calling a press conference to introduce the new Commissioner for Refugees and then not allowing him to speak, turning irregular migration into a melodrama called Malta Stands Alone Before The Invading Africans – the man is all over the shop.

The new (hair-brained) scheme is open to the victims of violent crime who have tried, and failed, to get compensation from those who assaulted them. The Attorney General will decide whether they are deserving cases or not. I’m really uneasy about all this, as we’re bringing in the outlandish concept of blood money. In our legal system, as in all other contemporary European legal systems, when a violent crime is committed, the relationship thereafter is between the state and the person accused of committing the crime. The victim is extraneous to the situation.

In the prosecution, the victim – if the victim is still alive – has no role beyond that of a witness. This might seem grossly unjust and unfair, but it is actually a hallmark of civilisation. The days of a direct relationship between the criminal and his victim are long behind us. That approach survives only in less civilised societies, where victims have a say in how the criminal is made to pay, and where the assaulter pays blood money. You can call it compensation, but it is blood money all the same.

In our legal system, blood money isn’t part of the punishment meted out to the criminal. It is an entirely separate matter decided in a civil suit in the civil courts, and not during criminal prosecution. These cases are not decided on the basis of “you made me suffer and therefore you must pay me money”, but on purely pragmatic considerations. For example, if Slasher hits you in the face with a broken bottle and takes out one of your eyes, then the court might find, with the assistance of medical experts who will assess the extent of your disability, that you are entitled to Lm15,000 in compensation for loss of the use of that eye, which affects your earning potential. You won’t be awarded a single cent for having your looks ruined, or for pain and suffering. Those just don’t come into it.

The Justice Minister probably thinks he is doing an amazing thing. What’s amazing is that something like this was top of his priority list. Well, maybe it’s not so amazing. After all, this is the man who wasted time writing to the Floral Club and the Karate Association to get them to support Paul Vincenti’s campaign to have abortion criminalised in the Constitution, allowing us to interfere in the lives of our great-great-great-grandchildren from beyond the grave.

I don’t see any victims of violent crime out begging on the streets or living in homeless shelters. On the other hand, the shelters are jam-packed with women and children who have been driven from their homes because of their husbands’ violent crimes. For them, there’s no compensation and no government assistance. They rely entirely on charity. Once again, the government has taken the easier option of helping the few rather than making the tough choices involved in helping the many. How much easier it is to make a law that will give Lm10,000 to those who have been assaulted than it is to face up to all those miserable women and children cowering in shelters for victims of domestic violence. But the truth about domestic violence doesn’t square with the right-wing vision of reality – Malta as a place where there is a version of the holy family behind every set of four walls.

We have been told that the crimes covered by this new scheme are GBH and – ridiculously – homicide. The Attorney General’s office must be expecting a long queue of ghostly applicants. Or is it the families of the murdered who will get compensation from the government? That’s even more insane. Somebody kills your husband and the government gives you a chunk of money, when all it should be giving you – and that’s what it’s there for – is a widow’s pension and an allowance for any underage children you might have.

The ministry says that it will be expanding the list of “eligible crimes” beyond GBH and murder. To what, exactly? I’m surprised to find that there are other violent crimes beyond those two. Well, no – there are others, like having your home or vehicles set on fire by intolerant maniacs, as many of us discovered last year. But that’s why there is something called insurance, so that the government needn’t get involved in this kind of thing like some grandmaster distributing munificence to the deserving.