We have been saying it until we are now blue in the face: the dichotomous and quasi-schizophrenic role played by Malta’s Attorney General is a serious inhibition to the country’s rule of law.

This, in a nutshell, was the verdict on that role as passed by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission yesterday.

This was not the opinion of Maltese or foreign journalists, not is it the opinion of those meddling European parliamentarians or even of the European Union.

This is the opinion of the CoE’s Venice Commission, composed of independent constitutional law experts, created back in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and at a time of urgent need for constitutional assistance in Central and Eastern Europe.

And now it has come to the aid of Malta when, again, there is a dire need for constitutional assessment and assistance.

There were several deeply troubling findings by the experts, who published their draft opinion yesterday but it is that of the role of the Attorney General that smacks so loudly of the frightening blurring of the lines that are meant to separate the powers that be.

The Commission has found that the double role of Malta’s Attorney General – that of simultaneously being the advisor of the government and the prosecutor - is ‘problematic’.  ‘Problematic’, may be one polite way of putting it, we would prefer to use stronger language after the way we have seen those two roles leveraged against each other since 2013. 

‘Deeply disturbing’ may be one such appropriate phrase. That is because, let’s face it, there has been no Maltese government in recent memory that has been accused of so many prosecutable offences than the current government.

When, and if, that happens, one really needs to ask how the Attorney General could possibly both defend the government and prosecute against the government at the same time – like someone playing tennis against himself, running from one side of the court to the other to return shots or, in this case, legal arguments in the other kind of court.

Perhaps at the time of the writing of the law, those erudite legal scholars had assumed that a government would always be beyond reproach, would run the country in good faith and its members would not seek to so brazenly skim from the public coffers as we have seen so much of in recent years.

At this stage it matters little whether there was skimming or not, what matters is that there is no one to ably prosecute against the government should such charges ever be levelled.

This leaves us in something of a unique bind, but the Venice Commission has presented a solution in the form of the creation of an independent Director of Public Prosecutions (or a Prosecutor General or a Public Prosecutor), which would remove that rather concerning duality which represents, in its very essence, a gross violation what the rule of law is meant to be all about.

Such a role would assume the prosecuting powers from the Attorney General, who would remain on as the legal advisor to the government.  And that person would no longer need to look in the mirror every morning to decide which person he is to be.

But, again, this has nothing to do with making the Attorney General’s life easier, it is about ensuring the proper checks and balances that need to be installed into a democracy for it to be truly healthy.  Healthy, Malta’s democracy is not in this context where Malta is at least on this particular level, ours is one of the sickest democracies in Europe.

This concentration of the powers of adviser to the government and prosecutor in one institution makes the office very powerful, the Commission rightly pointed out.

This Director of Public Prosecutions would also absorb the functions of magisterial inquiries, another area where we are falling well short of the mark. 

In reaction, the government yesterday noted that the opinion focussed on laws and systems that were passed or implemented years back, and not about laws introduced by this government. A good look at the report will expose this falsehood. 

But even if it was simply a question of having inherited a situation, it must be observed that that situation has been exploited to its maximum potential recently as evidenced so many times through concerted efforts to stifle the results of magisterial inquiries, to prevent them from taking place and the legal machinations employed to protect the government, its members and functionaries against prosecution.

This is simply not on.  The country not only deserves but direly needs a Public Prosecutor to set matters straight, but can anyone really see the current government opening itself up to such scrutiny?  If it had nothing to hide, it would certainly do so in the name of the overriding national interest.