Shocked and surprised by the general outcry against the Economy Minister’s aggressive decision to freeze my bank account last week, and stunned by the fact that they were rapped as a result by international organisations for the protection of journalists, the government had a knee-jerk reaction. The Ministers for Justice and Education called a joint press conference in which they presented to journalists, before it had been brought before Parliament, a Bill for a new law which will supersede the Press Act. Contrary to popular belief, the Bill was not cobbled together over the last few days in reaction to the ongoing furore concerning Christian Cardona and his fractured attempts to avenge himself on me.

This Bill has been hanging around in draft form for the last few months, and has already been the subject of discussion among lawyers working in the field of libel. They had heard already about the absurd clause it includes, which stipulates that ongoing prosecutions for criminal defamation will continue even after the law under which they are being prosecuted ceases to exist. My lawyers had, in fact, already begun mounting a challenge to this abusive clause months before it became public a few days ago. There are only 10 prosecutions for criminal defamation right now, and three of them are mine, two of them at the instigation of Minister Konrad Mizzi, a member of the government who approved this Bill and will be voting on it, and his communications aide who is completely invisible in his endless troubles with the media.

The only thing the government will have added to that Bill, before its sudden decision to try to wipe out a bad problem with an even worse one, was the clause which bars plaintiffs in libel cases from using precautionary warrants against defendants. That was a clear reaction to the disaster of last week. There is no way it would have occurred to them before, or to the lawyer who drafted the Bill, that they should do that. Nobody had ever used a precautionary warrant in a libel suit before; the precautionary warrant used against MaltaToday by Azzopardi Fisheries was not connected to a libel suit but was for a threatened suit for commercial damages, as distinct from libel.

The government must have thought that this Bill would turn the discussion away from the abusive actions of its Economy Minister and his EU policy aide and towards something more akin to praise for its liberal progressiveness. Instead, the disaster was compounded. Launching the Bill in the midst of public anger about a government minister’s attempts to silence those who report about his extra-curricular activities meant – and any public relations consultant worth his salt should have told them this – that people were immediately predisposed to regard anything and everything in the proposed law with suspicion and hostility, seeing it as the confection of a media-hating Cabinet. And that is exactly what happened. After the briefest of pauses while people digested what was in it, a second tidal wave of anger hit the government. And the name of that anger, this time, was ‘Don’t touch our internet’. Could the government’s decision have been more misjudged? Maltese people are hooked on the internet. They are obsessed with social media. We get our news online. We don’t want anyone tampering with that. Then came the inevitable suspicions that it’s all being done to shut down “certain websites”, to control others, to put people off setting up anything on the internet that carries news and views.

What a disaster, really – a second mammoth public relations disaster riding on the back of one that had not yet gone away. And now, the government is fighting its battles with the governed on multiple fronts. Added to its pains about rampant corruption, cronyism with revolting developers of skyscrapers and giant blocks of flats posing as Hard Rock hotels, environmental destruction and the American University of Baksheesh, Cabinet ministers who can’t keep it in their pants and others who are trying to keep their money out of sight in suspect jurisdictions, it has now added anger about constraints on press freedom and attempts at silencing criticism and muzzling the media.

“We don’t want everyone to register,” the Minister of Janice has been saying, panicked at the mounting tide of public revulsion. “We just want editors of news and current affairs websites to register, just like newspapers and broadcast media have to do.” Oh, really? Any sensible person, or draft-bill-writer who understood the first thing about media in the contemporary age, could have told the government that the solution to this perceived ‘anomaly’ in the registration system is not to add the internet to an archaism that governs print and broadcast media, but to remove the requirement of registration altogether, for everyone. It is a remnant from the colonial era, which Mintoff thought fit to write into a new law when the country became a republic in 1974 – precisely because it suited his totalitarian, autocratic spirit, mindset and purposes. Instead of repealing Mintoff’s law which makes it mandatory for newspapers and broadcast stations to register their editors with the government, the government is seeking to extend Mintoff’s 1974 law, in 2017, to the internet. Are they insane? No, they are something else entirely, far worse than that.

 

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