As is my inexplicable, albeit eccentric, habit of winking at statues and effigies when I walk casually past them, I did so the other hot summer evening when, perspiring to the noodles, I trudged into Villa Parisio in Hal Lija and past the bust of Mabel Strickland for the launching of the Institute of Maltese Journalists’ splendid publication When Judges Dissent. The book contains a collection of sentences of the European Court of Human Rights on which the Maltese Judge Giovanni Bonello, a former member of the court, had a separate opinion from that of his colleagues on the same bench.

As the elegant hall filled up with an interesting array of guests, from journalists and students to lawyers and avid bookworms, from have-beens to wannabees, I knew it was going to be a memorable serata, as the legal jargon goes.

With Giovanni Bonello and President Emeritus Guido De Marco among the speakers, the programme was bound to be a cheerful one. We were not disappointed. They are both highly colourful, learned characters who can spin a story out of a daily shaving mishap on any given morning. We had earlier been no less professionally addressed by Dr Joe Giglio, IGM chairman Malcolm J. Naudi, and the editor of the book, Mario Schiavone.

Yet, I could not help pondering the ironies that were also satiating that same 450-year-old room. As I listened to the speeches, I tried to grapple with the historical conundrum that quickly manifested itself in there. You see, Villa Parisio, as is befitting, today houses the Strickland Foundation, which partly funded the IGM book and which, loyally and steadfastly, carries on the torch of its late mentor’s vision.

While many a decade ago no Strickland devotee would have stood within visual distance of Vincenzo Bonello, one of the internees sadly deported to Uganda during the Second World War, today’s torch-bearers openly support a publication that rightly lauds his son and his work.

The Stricklands and all Stricklandjani were, in the not-too-distant past, sworn enemies of the Nationalist Party. Professor De Marco is a former deputy leader of the Nationalist Party. Today he is the chairman of the Strickland Foundation’s council of administration. I really enjoy making such observations, in the honest belief that people do change and adapt to new challenges and circumstances. Those who don’t, merely fester away. Lawyers make U-turns sound like a Tchaikovsky symphony. After all, old enemies such as the French and the English, the French and the Germans and the English and the Germans are today the best of chums. We only tease the Turks at football.

The Villa Parisio audience that evening of course heard a lot about human rights. Giovanni Bonello and Guido de Marco have been mates since their university years, and both have sad stories to tell and poignant cases to recall in relation to human rights in Malta, which they naturally do with their usual descriptive power and intellectual gusto.

As I counted the ironies, however, I felt that somehow there was something missing. We heard a lot about the threat to human rights in the Malta of the 1980s, when both de Marco and Bonello, lawyers and Nationalists, were heavily involved in tackling the problems that cropped up, sometimes with monotonous regularity, during that politically volatile decade in Maltese politics. We also heard respectful, though not as forceful, references to the 1930s and 1940s with the wartime injustice meted out to the Uganda internees.

The missing link was, of course, the 1960s, and glaringly so. Prof. de Marco was born in 1931 and Judge Giovanni Bonello in 1936, so they were old enough and already qualified enough at the time to remember, today, what really went on with regard to human rights when Malta had first a colonial administration (1958-1962) and then a Nationalist government (1962-1971).

Prof. de Marco’s story of the unfortunate Hamrun green-grocer and his family who had to sleep in his van after being denied their own home to make space for a politically privileged couple of newly-weds, made touching listening. However, it does pale away somewhat when compared to such notorious human rights breaches of the 1960s, like denying people their religious and political freedoms and right of expression by banning newspapers from government hospitals and offices; the prohibition of Labour-inclined young men from joining the Police Corps; the election-eve recruitment of strictly blue-eyed grave attendants who later became civil servants overnight; the moral torture of old men and women wanting to vote one way but forced to vote in another; the humiliating spectacle of young couples being wed inside sacristies and the cruel burial of Labourites in “unconsecrated” ground (better known in Maltese as il-mi¿bla) at the cemetery, as shamefully accorded to one of our greatest writers, Guze’ Ellul Mercer.

There is more than a single volume to be written there. Each and every case would have had the European Court of Human Rights crying foul in one shrill voice. It did not exist, alas. Perhaps the good judges of Europe then were more intent on curbing the soaring popularity of the mini skirt, stopping university students from protesting in the streets and retaining the old status quo.

Back at Villa Parisio, though, there was one special moment of sheer justice when Prof. de Marco unhesitatingly gave former Labour Prime Minister Dr Alfred Sant due credit for Judge Giovanni Bonello’s appointment to the European Court of Human Rights. The then Nationalist Opposition had its own favourite candidate, and we all know it wasn’t Giovanni Bonello.

I’ve almost run out of ironies. Walking back past Mabel Strickland’s bust, I could swear it was winking back at me, but it must have been the sirocco heat of that evening.