The Opposition Leader has still not accepted the invitation that the prime minister made three weeks ago to set up a parliamentary committee to look into how to strengthen the institutions and legislation to fight corruption, the OPM said in a statement yesterday.

Such a committee would discuss any proposal made by anyone interested, including proposals relating to the prescription of criminal offences. The committee could for instance discuss whether to remove prescription in cases of corruption (as proposed by the opposition) in the light that prescription exists also for other serious offences such as voluntary homicide, rape, paedophilia, corruption of minors, abuses on children, abuses on disabled persons, explosives offences, injury of a serious nature, hold ups, attacks on the elderly, and others. Or if prescription is retained, whether its term for the different crimes should be lengthened, rather than removed.

In the Maltese legal system it was not proper, as being proposed by the Opposition Leader, to give the judiciary an investigative role. Such a mixture of the state’s executive and judicial powers would not be right and whoever proposed this showed a lack of knowledge of the constitution. In fact, the Labour government of 1998 kept in abeyance a law which proposed that a member of the judiciary would serve also as an investigator of cases of corruption.

It was for this reason that the prime minister had proposed the parliamentary committee. The government hoped that the opposition would accept the prime minister’s invitation of 18 July, if it truly believed the fight against corruption was important, and not just a political gimmick and a spin.