The government yesterday seized on the fact that it took a constitutional court to order a politically-connected deputy police commissioner to stand down from the murder investigation of Daphne Caruana Galizia to prove that the rule of law in Malta is very much alive and kicking.
And in so doing it also noted how the judgement served as testimony to the fact that the courts take their decisions freely, independently and with full autonomy. That is a very strange statement indeed.
That the government even needed to stress such a point is most indicative of the times in which we are living, and of just how much the rule of law, a given in democratic societies, is under stress and duress.
We, however, beg to differ with the government’s rather lopsided interpretation.
If the rule of law were in any kind of a satisfactory state, it would not have required the bereaved family of the deceased to have taken court action to seek the deputy commissioner’s removal from the case.
The fact of the matter is that if the rule of law in this country was truly on any sort of an even keel, the state’s legal counsel, the Attorney General, would not have appealed the initial ruling.
If rule of law in this country were what it is meant to be, the state, through the Attorney General, would not have fought that appeal tooth and nail.
If the rule of law were really as the government cuts it out to be, the government or the police force would have immediately recognised there was a problem with the husband of a Minister of Cabinet investigating the murder of that same government’s harshest critic.
Lest the government needs reminding, the rule of law does not necessarily need to come from the courts – the courts are the last resort when the rule of law fails a country’s citizens. And, to add insult to injury, that very faculty that should be available to every citizen was all the same resisted so strongly by the powers that be.
We must state that we are not calling, nor have we called, the integrity of Deputy Commissioner Silvio Valletta into question. Valletta may, after all, be the best man for the job. He may just the man to unravel the mystery as to who, exactly, commissioned the journalist’s murder.
The fact that the government has fought so ferociously, through the AG, to retain him on the case is, it must be admitted, more than somewhat suspect. It is true that the deputy commissioner had stood down from the case as soon as the First Court judgement in his respect was delivered, and that was undeniably the correct move.
But the government was somewhat disingenuous yesterday when it declared that the court had rejected a request for all acts and decisions taken during the investigation to be reviewed.
In actual fact, the constitutional court partially upheld the appeal and ordered the re-examination of the acts and decisions taken by Valletta, but not of the entire case. This could, however, amount to much of the case itself as, to our knowledge, the deputy commissioner had played a leading role in the investigation from the get go.
The court also noted that the deputy commissioner’s presence in the investigation could lead to ‘serious doubts in the mind of the citizen’ as to whether the investigation was carried out impartially, doubts which would grow considerably should ongoing investigations fail to establish who, exactly, commissioned the murder.
This, the court ruled, would cause further undue suffering to the family as well as reputational damage to the state and, we might add, to every law-abiding citizen of the country. Anger and mistrust in the institutions would mount, the court said, and the deputy commissioner and his wife may also suffer undue fallout.
The fact of the matter is that the writing has been on the wall on this case for so long, and the question is why the government and the Attorney General failed, or refused, to see it.
Justice must always be done, and also be seen to have been done. While some have ignored that fact for reasons best known to them, the country should be grateful for the wisdom of the constitutional court.