A drunken 20-year-old man, who allegedly exposed himself to a nine-year-old girl when she asked him to buy her a soft drink at a village feast, is put under house arrest. The prosecution argues that he might tamper with the evidence; the defence argues that he doesn’t even know who the child is, that she was just a kid running around at the festa. Meanwhile, a middle-aged man who is facing trial for “human trafficking” – white slavery is not down as a specific crime in Malta – was left to roam free under a bail bond. He’s jumped bail and appears to have left the country, and the court has issued an order for his arrest. Fat lot of good that will do: it’s the easiest thing in the world for somebody with a Maltese passport to roam through Europe, and to live there without having to duck and hide. This is the case even when there’s an international arrest warrant out. As long as the escapee drives between one country and another, instead of flying, he can avoid showing identification for years, especially if he goes to one of the EU member States, like Britain, where identity cards are regarded as an affront to civil liberties. He won’t even need a new identity for his work. If you’re involved in the business of white slavery, you don’t get asked for a clean police record.

There’s more. The man who is facing trial for allegedly stabbing the mother of his child 50 times and killing her was not held on remand. Instead, he was put under house arrest against a pledge of Lm10,000, put up by his mother. As with a perverse joke, he was given permission to leave the house only for Sunday Mass, which seems to me an indication not of how seriously we take Catholicism, but of how lightly. The trouble with house arrest is that there is no policeman behind your door 24 hours a day to make sure you never leave the premises. It’s up to you and if you are caught outside your house then you are in deep muck. Yet those whose behaviour indicates a total lack of respect for the law and for human dignity are likely to try popping out through a rear window or at 3am from time to time, so house arrest pending trial is really just one hell of a risk where very serious crimes are concerned, and totally unnecessary with lesser crimes, because it achieves nothing at all.

There’s a crazy dichotomy in putting under house arrest a man who has allegedly murdered the mother of his daughter in a gruesome fashion and a drunken youngster who allegedly unzipped his fly in the face of a nine-year-old girl at a village feast. I don’t think the latter is going to get the first available yacht out to Sicily in the dead of night, but the former might very well do so and in fact tried it but was caught in time. If you are facing life in prison, escaping from house arrest is a very simple matter of walking out of your front door, and it is worth the risk. Leaving Malta is even easier if nobody sneaks on you. All you have to do is what hundreds of people do every day: pay a ferryman to take you to the other side, and then take it from there. Illegal immigrants escape from Malta like this all the time. For criminals with contacts and cash, it’s even easier.

The man facing trial for the murder of his former companion was only caught because his mother filed an application to have her pledge lifted, saying she had reason to believe her son was planning to abscond, and she didn’t want to lose her money if he did so. Her request was granted, and her son was found in a boat in which he planned to reach Sicily, with plenty of cash and some heroin about his person, or so the newspaper reports claimed.

It’s true that our prisons are overcrowded and that people kept there on remand are a cost to the national coffers, but surely better judgement should prevail as to who might run away and who will not. To a white slaver, the loss of a Lm20,000 bond is a scant deterrent to taking the risk of escaping justice. If he succeeds in getting away, he will live the life of a fugitive who will never seen his country again, but he will still be making money in his criminal choice of career and will probably consider it a lot better than years spent at Corradino prisons.

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The human rights watchdog called Human Rights Watch (wouldn’t you know it) has spiralled from the sublime to the ridiculous with its claim that Saddam Hussein’s rights are being prejudiced by the inability of the Iraqi court, in which he will be tried once more, to give him a fair hearing. I know that it is completely out of order to say this, because we are equal before God and the law and all that – but who cares if Saddam doesn’t get a fair hearing? This is a man by whose order many thousands were killed, tortured or both. He was the Hitler of the Middle East. Hitler had the good sense to pop a cyanide pill in his bunker before the Americans got him. It’s a pity that Saddam didn’t do the same in his bolt-hole, and an even greater pity that someone, somewhere, decided that going through the motions of a great public trial would make more sense than a quiet bullet through the head followed by the discovery of his corpse. Had Adolf Hitler been captured alive, what would have been achieved by trying him for crimes against humanity and jailing him for life? Precisely nothing.

Now that Saddam has been caught alive, he has to be tried. It’s far too late for that quiet bullet and it’s unlikely that he’ll pull a Slobodan Milosevic on us. But we can do without the absurdities of groups like Human Rights Watch, who should be sticking up for the trampled-upon, rather than for the one who, for 30 long years, wore the hob-nailed boots and stuck them with great cruelty into anyone who stood in his way. Even if the only achievement of the war in Iraq was to get rid of that monster – and he could be got rid of no other way, all assassination plots having failed – then the war was worth all the trouble that came afterwards. We may be unable to see that now, but the shape of history can only be seen in the long-term, not in the immediate aftermath of events.

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I’ve always wondered why the international press calls him Saddam Hussein instead of Hussein Saddam. I think it started with confusion as to which was his first name and which was his surname, and by then it was too late. Islamic culture and the cultures of the Far East put the family name before the given name, but western culture does the opposite. If Saddam were to take up citizenship of France, the USA, Britain or Italy, he would be Mr Hussein Saddam, and not Mr Saddam Hussein, and so it should be with the news. Ignorance about Arabic names leads to some quite funny howlers in the British and American press, particularly with the conservative Arabic custom of referring to women as “mother of” followed by the name of their eldest son. Because we Maltese use the Arabic word for mother, omm, we know that Om Hussein means “Hussein’s mother” and is not the woman’s first name and surname – but European and American journalists don’t know this. The several crises of the past few months have seen various Oms interviewed on television and in the newspapers. I watched on television a British journalist as he interviewed yet another howling woman shrouded in black, whom he introduced as Om Ibrahim and then went on to address her casually as Om. There are still a lot of people in Malta who use the “Arabic” form when giving their names: Micallef Tony, Buttigieg Mark. I always wonder why they do it. Maybe it’s the legacy of the classroom roll-call, when teachers read out the register surname first. Surely they should have grown out of it by now.

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It’s not the trees or the lack of them that bother me about the new plans for the square in front of the prime minister’s office. It’s the name, with that glaring mistake that grates each time I look at it, and which has wormed its way into all kinds of official websites and possibly also documents – though I wouldn’t know about that. For heaven’s sake, people, get yourselves an education: Castile is spelt with one ‘l’ and not with two. It’s spelt with two ‘l’s in French – hence Auberge de Castille – but in English, it’s Castile. So it’s Castile Square or Castile Place or whatever you wish to call it, as long as it has one ‘l’. And of course, this means that there were no knights from Castille, either – only from Castile.