When a government minister authorises police to monitor private telephone calls, record them

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 30 March 2017, 11:17 Last update: about 8 years ago

A case heard in court yesterday drew attention to an issue which requires proper attention by parliament, the press and civic rights groups, but which receives no such attention at all. The court declared inadmissible as evidence recordings of telephone conversations which took place between two defendants who are under prosecution in relation to a contract for IT services at the state general hospital.

The recordings were made by the state Security Service, the only authority empowered to monitor people’s telephone conversations and other communications, at the request of the police. The court ruled that they are not admissible as evidence because the prosecution could not produce the warrant which authorised the recordings to be made. It is not clear whether the police had the warrant and mislaid it, whether they have it and refuse to show it, or whether they never had a warrant at all. The reports of the case, in the newspapers, say that “the prosecution repeatedly refused to comply” – in other words, they didn’t actually say they have no warrant, as far as I can make out – and instead said that “nobody should question the practice of monitoring and recording telephone conversations”.

The court was not impressed, with the magistrate pointing out that the Security Services Act makes it mandatory for a warrant to be obtained from the “responsible Minister” for telephone conversations to be intercepted and/or recorded by the Security Services. Without that warrant, any interception of telephone calls made by the Security Services is illegal and therefore cannot be used as evidence in a court of law. “No court may allow any situation of illegality, and every court is in duty bound to make sure that the monitoring of telephone calls (by the state), which is an invasion of people’s privacy, is only carried out lawfully,” the magistrate said.

The prosecution is led by Inspector Ian Abdilla, who heads the Economic Crimes Unit, which drew my attention. It is probably the first time I have heard of any case involving white-collar crime in which there was telephone monitoring by the police. All the other cases which have made the news through reports from the Courts of Justice seem, as I recall, to have involved crimes of a different nature: drug trafficking, smuggling, that kind of thing. So, are the police now monitoring telephone conversations to find out about IT contracts awarded or not awarded by the government? That seems a little extreme. On that basis, one would expect the Security Services to be monitoring and recording the telephone conversations of several members of the government, not least the Prime Minister, his chief of staff, the deputy Prime Minister and Konrad Mizzi, and certainly of their accountant Brian Tonna, if only with a view to finding out what exactly it is they are up to and for whom Egrant Inc was incorporated in Panama. They might well be, but somehow, I doubt it.

And that brings me to the purpose of writing this, which is that the warrants for telephone intercepts are signed by the Minister for Home Affairs (the Minister of the Interior), who is responsible for the police. This, of course, raises so many issues, especially with a government like this one, that I don’t quite know where to begin. I shouldn’t have to list them at all, because one hopes they would be obvious. If the police need to monitor the telephone conversations of a cabinet minister or two, how can they go to another cabinet minister for the warrant to do so? If they need to monitor the Prime Minister’s telephone conversations, how can they go to one of his Ministers for permission to do it? The Minister has a huge conflict of interest, and also, it is entirely inappropriate that a cabinet minister should have the veto over whether to have his boss’s telephone calls monitored. This puts him in the inappropriate position where, whether he refuses the warrant or not, he will have a hold over the man by whose grace and favour he stays in the cabinet.

There is more. A cabinet minister is a dangerous person in whom to vest sole responsibility for deciding whether to allow person X’s telephone calls to be secretly monitored and recorded, because there are all kinds of political motives why he might want calls to be monitored or not to be monitored. The police might want to monitor his telephone calls, too, and then what could they do about it?

When Manuel Mallia was Minister for Home Affairs, the situation was even more worryingly ludicrous, and dangerous, because he has a wide client-base of some of Malta’s worst criminals. The police would have had to go to him for a warrant to monitor criminals or suspected criminals who might have well been his clients – the drug trafficker Mario Camilleri, known as L-Imniehru, being a case in point.

The proper person to sign a warrant for the monitoring of telephone calls by the police is a judge. This gives people some degree of comfort that their phones calls are not monitored and recorded by politically-motivated police officers with a warrant from a politically-motivated cabinet minister. This matter has got to be addressed, fast. That it is being ignored, in a situation when the last person we would want giving permission for the police-monitoring of telephone conversations is a member of this government, is extremely worrying.