It happens every time. Whenever anyone who had power in the Labour governments prior to 1987 goes to court to claim that his human rights have been violated, my stomach churns with nausea.

At the risk of sounding droll, I would not dream of suggesting that anyone's rights ought not to be protected, including those who trampled on them. What I cannot stand is the hypocritical self-righteousness. The sight of pre-1987 Labour men, who were politically responsible for denying thousands of people their rights, now whimpering about this or that human right is nauseating.

Labour's political legacy from the mid-seventies onwards is a vile smorgsbord of human rights’ violations. At one point or another, they denied practically all of them: from the right to free speech to that of assembly, from equality before the law to the entire range of workers’ rights.

Pre-1987 Labour was an authoritarian regime for whom human rights were a nuisance rather than the birthright of each citizen. It was a time when ic-cittadin l-ahhar was the political bedrock of the government. In this sense, thank God for Alfred Sant.

It was not accidental that the first Act of Parliament passed by the first Eddie Fenech Adami government in 1987 was the lock, stock and barrel incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into the Maltese legal code. The move sounded the death knell for the past and symbolised the way forward. Without human rights there could be nothing – no democracy, no equality of opportunity, no prosperity. The future belonged to the people not to the authoritarian state Malta had been stuck with for a decade and a half.

And then the irony of ironies struck. Who was the first man to make a legal case to have his human rights protected? The one and only Lorry Sant. The patron saint of everything that was ugly, violent, corrupt and underhanded about the Labour regime went to court to have his human rights protected. The man who once published a propaganda pamphlet showing a picture of a long queue of lowly supplicants leading up to his front door, was now staking his claim to the Rights of Man. It was like a prostitute claiming compensation for sexual harassment.

This week we had a similarly ignominious antic in court, courtesy of an even more exalted representative of Labour's past: Lorry Sant's boss, one Dom Mintoff. The former Salvatur ta' Malta is claiming that his human rights have been violated because of some damage done to the water and sewage system at his house and the water and electricity bill he is refusing to pay.

Now, I do not give a flying f*** about whether Mintoff is in the right. The courts will decide that in due course. But I do give more than a few flying f*** about the fact that Mintoff is once again invoking human rights for his personal gain when he himself presided over a cruel regime which denied thousands of citizens their rights.

The man trying to squeeze the last cent of public funds out of his sewage system is the same one who was politically responsible for ruining careers, lives and estates. I knew people who lost their lives because of the way they were treated under Dom Mintoff's Labour governments. Now, that very same man, well into his eighties, is in court trying to grab a few hundred pounds with one hand and waving a human rights flag with the other. Simply disgusting.

Dom Mintoff lacks an essential character trait: a sense of dignity. Without it, we see him for what he really is, what he has been all along. This is a man who has just won about a third of a million liri in compensation for the effect that the Marsaxlokk power station had on his other house.

A man with a sense of dignity, a former prime minister with the tiniest respect for the office he once occupied, would have quietly taken the money and retired gracefully from public life. Not Dom Mintoff. First, he appeals against the sentence which awarded him 300K+. Presumably, a third of a million liri is not enough for a socialist in his eighties to live on. Secondly, he starts another court case to try and make a few hundred liri by way of compensation for damage done to his other house.

When Dom Mintoff strutted along the bastions of power as Prime Minister many, including some of his detractors, were dazzled. His crass bravado, chronic provincialism and pathological highhandedness were seen as the unfortunate “small” faults of a great man. It was a small price to pay, ran the argument, for the honour of having such a man at the helm of government. Some might still remember a bit of Labour lore: Mintoff's “genious” was wasted on a small country like Malta.

Now, shorn of power, it turns out that Mintoff's faults are precisely what the man amounts to. Without the glamour of office, his sense of state amounts to miserliness of the lowest common denominator.

I know that Dom Mintoff did a few good deeds in the first half of the s1970s, particularly in the social sector. However good these deeds might have been, they were amply undone by his megalomania in the subsequent two decades.

As a politician, Mintoff was always a horrible man. He is now meeting his worst fate: being a very wealthy octogenarian fussing over a couple of hundred liri in water and sewage bills.

With no power to make the nation's life miserable, Mintoff ends up doing it to the only victim left: himself. How sad.

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