It is unfortunate that the Police and Army Minister has gone to war with the Ombudsman over the matter of who and what is legally empowered to hear complaints by commissioned army officers about promotions or the lack of them. The battle is now right out in the open and cannot get worse, with the Ombudsman taking the matter to the Courts of Justice. He has clearly done this not because he wants to score points over the Police and Army Minister, or because he is a control freak who especially wants to consider these complaints and let nobody else do them, but because – as a former chief justice and a long-serving judge – he has correctly recognised that the avenues of redress for commissioned officers, on which the Minister insists, are a travesty.
The Police and Army Minister, who for many years in his previous incarnation defended some of Malta’s most heinous criminals before the Ombudsman in his previous incarnation as a trial judge and chief justice, has been unwise to allow matters to reach this stage. In his reply, filed in court yesterday, to the Ombudsman’s judicial protest, Manuel Mallia has taken issue with Joe Said Pullicino’s knowledge and understanding of the law. Given who and what they both were before they took on their current roles, this can only be construed as an insult, and this insult has been delivered even as Mallia insisted in the same document (and there within is yet another insult), that he “respects the Ombudsman as a constitutional office” – but not, it is implied, the Ombudsman himself.
Manuel Mallia says that the law precludes commissioned officers from going straight to the Ombudsman with their complaints about army promotions because they are supposed to first ‘exhaust all other avenues of redress’. These other avenues of redress, hoops through which they are meant to jump before they go to the Ombudsman, are filing their complaint with their commanding officer, who in turn brings it to the attention of the Army Minister and the Head of State, who are supposed to deal with it.
Given that it is the Army Minister who has perpetrated some of those abusive promotions to favour that same commanding officer and put him in the position he is now, it stands to reason that the officers cannot take their complaints against the perpetrator and the beneficiary to that same perpetrator and beneficiary. They are not independent, but are directly involved. If, within a corporation, an employee has been abused by the human resources manager, and takes her complaint directly to the board of directors, the board of directors does not tell her to follow procedure and take her complaint to the human resources manager because that is what she is supposed to do.
The Ombudsman has recognised the travesty of justice inherent in the procedure on which the Army Minister insists. The Army Minister, being what he is – a defence lawyer who insists on the letter of the law while crudely defying its spirit, who is also of fairly limited intelligence despite the myth to the contrary – doesn’t care about that. And it is not only that he doesn’t care, but that he is using the letter of the law to protect himself and his protégé, the man he has made commanding officer of Malta’s army, from examination by the Ombudsman. In other words, he knows he is in the wrong and is using the tactics he honed while defending criminals to defend himself and his favourites.
By going to war with the Ombudsman so as to protect himself and avoid scrutiny of his actions, Manuel Mallia undermines his own office rather than that of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman, not just as a constitutionally-appointed office but also in terms of the incumbent himself personally, carries great weight and credibility. He is respected and respectable. Manuel Mallia is neither of those things, and his exposure and antics over his first year or so as Cabinet minister have caused him to further lose respect not gain it. Now he is only making the situation worse. Not only is he battling somebody who has far more credibility and respect than he does, but it is quite clear to most people with sense that he is refusing to cooperate with the Ombudsman not because of what he says the letter of the law is, but because he wants to protect himself from scrutiny. His actions are not well received at all, not even by those who voted Labour.