The Minister for Justice has taken umbrage at my column about the record number of cases being decided against Malta by the court in Strasbourg, and he accuses me of having “an obsession to throw a dark shadow on our highest legal institution”. Well, thank God he doesn’t teach English as a foreign language.

The Minister for Justice seems to believe that you have to be a lawyer to understand the law. I have no time for such nonsense. Nor can I take him seriously when he calls my words “an unfair attack on the guardian of our Constitution”, given that he is the very one who wants to use that Constitution to defeat democracy rather than to safeguard it. I am referring to his seriously misguided attempt – which has included pressuring all kinds of organisations into backing his efforts – at having a ban on abortion enshrined in our Constitution.

This is not Iran, and the personal views of some – even if they are in the majority – on what is a highly subjective matter have no place at all in the Constitution. If the Constitutional Court is the guardian of our Constitution, then the Constitution is the guardian of our democracy. If future generations wish to have an abortion law, then it is for them to decide and not for the Minister for Justice and the Gift of Life Movement in 2006.

The Constitution is there to protect us against the obsessive whims of people on zealous crusades. The Minister for Justice, the Gift of Life Movement, and the many people who have signed its petition want the ban on abortion written into the Constitution because they believe that abortion is evil. Many of them also believe that divorce is evil, so are they now going to suggest a permanent veto on divorce legislation via the Constitution? I have another suggestion for them: going back in time and banning anal sex between two men, or returning to the days when adultery was a prosecutable offence. The way the law looks at adultery and anal sex has changed, though God’s supposed laws haven’t, and eventually, the laws on abortion and divorce will change too, reflecting social change. This is precisely what the Minister for Justice and the Gift of Life Movement want to prevent. They don’t seem to realise that there is a fundamental flaw in their reasoning, which becomes fully apparent when we imagine what might have happened had our forebears, who felt the same way about adultery as some people do now about abortion, had written a ban on it into the Constitution.

The Minister for Justice is only there for a few years, but the damage he can do by interfering with the Constitution will last for many generations. I am dismayed to see that so many intelligent people from all three political parties have felt press-ganged into backing him on this one, either because they think it will make them look good with the voters, or because they are not that intelligent, after all, and fail to see that they are not saving babies but undermining democracy. Subjective views have no place in the Constitution.

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Enough of the plastic foetus brigade, though. Let’s get down to the points which the Minister for Justice raised in his letter to this newspaper. He called the Constitutional Court “the guardian of the Constitution”. Well, of course it is meant to be that, but here’s the pea under the minister’s mattress: when we most needed it to be so, it wasn’t.

It’s all well and good being the guardian of the Constitution in a functioning democracy, where the only people who get bombs or tyres laden with petrol behind their doors in the night are drug squad police and those who oppose the local Nazis. But what was the track record of the Constitutional Court in the days when Malta was not a functioning democracy and political violence was rife – in other words, when we most needed the Constitutional Court to serve its essential purpose? Curiously, the Minister for Justice unwittingly raised this very matter himself, when he praised the Constitutional Court for certain of its decisions. It just so happens that those decisions were related to the overturning of dreadful, pro-government judgements made by the very same Constitutional Court, in the Mintoff-Mifsud Bonnici years, on grounds of “the public interest.” Mhux fl-interess tal-poplu – remember that?

I won’t go into all the details here: I’ll just point the Minister for Justice in the direction of the National Library, where he can read editions of The Sunday Times from the darkest days of the Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici years. I was asked to write an article recently about the significance of the Page Thirteen column in those years, so the record of the Constitutional Court’s performance as the guardian of our Constitution is fairly fresh in my mind, if not in the minister’s. Nor do I think that the Constitutional Court was acting as the guardian of our Constitution when it awarded Lm350,000 – money that will come from the taxes of people who hate his guts – to Dom Mintoff for having his view ruined. The Constitutional Court only embarrassed itself with that craven judgement. It’s this kind of thing that undermines respect for the Constitutional Court, and not the words of a columnist on a Sunday morning.

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The Minister for Justice thinks that I am one of those women who is frightened by numbers (oh boy, is he ever wrong), and that if he throws a couple of statistics at me, I’m going to run off in a flap, dragging my calculator behind me. The Strasbourg court found Malta’s Constitutional Court to have been wrong in 15 out of 16 cases, which means 96 per cent. The minister is silly to say in the Constitutional Court’s defence that Strasbourg overturned four Spanish judgements last year, six German ones, and two Danish ones. What we need to know, so as to make a comparison of like with like, is this: six, four and two out of how many? And then we have to set the number of cases overturned not just against the number of cases filed, but against the number of people in the country. Four cases in which the European Court of Human Rights finds against Germany is not quite the same as four cases in which the same court finds against Malta. I take it the minister does understand ratios, percentages and averages, even though he is not the Minister for Education.

I suppose he was being disingenuous or Jesuitical when he accused me of “conveniently failing to mention” that these 16 judgements “were delivered over a period of 18 years.” One of them was delivered 18 years ago, yes – but the other 15 were delivered in the last six-and-a-half years.

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As for the San Leonardo Band Club judgement, it is completely irrelevant whether the club should have our sympathy for using requisitioned property. The club doesn’t have my sympathy, that’s for sure. The point is that the Strasbourg court decided, correctly, that it is bizarre for judges to sit in judgement over a case in which it is one of their own earlier judgements that is being challenged. This is precisely the sort of thing that Borat might describe as happening in Kazakhstan, in the amazingly popular film that is showing now. I suspect that the main reason so many Maltese find Borat amusing is because he reminds us of what life in Malta was like, and in some cases, still is.

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The Minister for Justice claims that in the last year, the Constitutional Court has delivered 37 judgements, 13 of which are in favour of the applicant. One deduces from this that the other 24 are in favour of the government. The minister thinks that this is an impressive record. Of course he does: he forms part of the government. That’s why it’s so ill-advised for a minister of justice to praise the Constitutional Court. And here I have to ask the question: why did he write in to defend the Constitutional Court? The Constitutional Court is neither a government department nor a government agency. Indeed, it is there to protect the citizen against the depredations of the government. There is such a thing as the separation of powers, but when a government minister reacts as though the Constitutional Court is part of his portfolio, the public perception of the division between the government and the Constitutional Court gets a little blurred.

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One last point: praising the Constitutional Court for doing its duty, as the Minister for Justice does, is ludicrous. You don’t praise constitutionally significant institutions for doing what they are there to do, for the simple reason that they don’t have the choice of doing otherwise.

The minister’s implication that we should praise the Constitutional Court as well as criticise it is eyebrow-raising. It is our duty to criticise the Constitutional Court in its failings, because the failings of a supreme court have fundamental national significance – as when they hand large amounts of taxpayers’ money to former premiers who had no respect for the Constitution, when their view is spoiled. On the other hand, it is not our duty to praise the Constitutional Court when it does what it is there to do. Nor is it the duty of the Minister for Justice, given that he forms part of the government from whose actions the Constitutional Court is there to safeguard the citizen.