A full audience turned up yesterday morning in the extreme heat at the Le Meridien Phoenicia ballroom in Floriana for the launch of a book of essays celebrating Judge Giovanni Bonello’s 70th birthday.

The judge, just retired from the European Court of Justice, promised no respite in the coming years.

Speaking at the launch, former president Guido de Marco reminisced how, as young university students, he and his colleagues used to gather in the house of Dr Bonello’s father in Valletta, facing on to St Christopher’s Street, little realising that they were meeting in the street named by the French as “Rue de Droits de l’Homme”.

Dr Bonello’s father, Vincenzo, was one of the Maltese deported to Africa by the British during the war and the impact of this arbitrary illegal deportation and its abuse of power had a huge impact on Dr Bonello’s outlook, not just in the famous Page 13 articles (analysed by Daphne Caruana Galizia in the book) in the 1980s but also in his opinions at the European Court, described by Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg as “adventurous legal opinions”, aiming to reach the new frontiers of the law.

Dr Bonello, replying, said he had recently received a book on human rights written by a British professor who teaches at a Swiss university, who had told him it was a letter, written by Dr Bonello in 1989, in which he disagreed with a judgement of the Constitutional Court, that had set him on the road to write a book about human rights.

The book, Celebratio Amicitiae, is published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti in conjunction with Midsea Books.