Last Tuesday in court, Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera, under cross-examination by my lawyer, insisted that she has never done anything illegal. She stressed, repeatedly, the legality of all her actions in public and private. It was as though she had never heard of the existence of a code of ethics for the judiciary, which is, when it comes down to it, what the fuss is all about.

I was nonplussed. As a magistrate, she deals in the interpretation of the letter of the law. But as a magistrate, she should be more highly attuned than others to the fact that not all that is legal is acceptable or even right. To give an example that is easy and straightforward to understand, adultery has been legal for many years now, but this doesn’t mean that it’s all right if we rush out to cheat on our spouses because the law allows us to do so.

Just before her cross-examination began, Magistrate Scerri Herrera put it down on record in court – a fact missed by the journalists who were there to report on the case – that she was not asking for my prosecution on the items that most transfixed the general public when I wrote about them last January and February, namely about her serial adultery, her lying and cheating, her clandestine sexual liaisons with police officers, her sitting in judgement over one Joseph Musumeci (and finding him not guilty) while she was conducting a secret affair with his brother, and much else in this vein.

This was a piece of strategy to avoid being cross-examined on these delicate matters. However, it begged the question as to the strange priorities of a magistrate who considers herself defamed by the suggestion that she is a friend of Super One journalist Charlon Gouder, while feeling she needn’t take action about the accusation that she targeted a man who had only recently become a father and in so doing destroyed an incipient family.

Through her selective highlighting of what she feels is defamatory in my many descriptions, last winter, of her character and behaviour, Magistrate Scerri Herrera has reduced her own case to the level of farce. The fact that she is there at all, speaking about these matters in court, is an embarrassment to her position. The fact appears to escape her that it is her own behaviour which has exposed her to such talk and accusations. One cannot imagine similar things being said about the more correct magistrates. There are simply no grounds for any such suggestions.

I sat there in the dock wondering what sort of country I am living in where a magistrate, cunningly disguised as an ordinary citizen while flexing her full muscle as a magistrate, can demand of the police that they prosecute a journalist for describing her as less than physically attractive, which turns out to be one of the items on my ‘charge-sheet’. It would be amusing were it not so utterly pathetic.

I sat there and thought about how my husband and I found three police officers waiting at our gate when we returned home at 1.30am on a cold February night, and how I was served an official summons to present myself for interrogation at Police Headquarters seven-and-a-half hours later, at 9am, failing which I would be arrested.

I remembered how I was held under arrest, physically prevented from leaving the room, still more the building, for more than four hours while I was interrogated on what I had written about Magistrate Scerri Herrera. Meanwhile, unknown to me at the time, another police officer had got hold of my internet service provider and demanded to know certain details about the registration of my website, telling the ISP that I would be held under arrest until those details were released.

And now, in court last Tuesday, I discover that it’s all because Magistrate Scerri Herrera took exception to descriptions of unwise partying and a demand for mobile lavatories from the council of which her paramour is mayor. You could think it ridiculous, but really it is tragic that we have come to this, that systems put in place to ensure that justice is done and seen to be done are instead used to parody it.

We now find ourselves in court discussing whether the magistrate looks, or does not look, like the back of a bus – one of the comments she found defamatory. One struggles against the temptation to take to court a postcard depicting the back of a bus, there to hold it up for scrutiny and a general opinion. To such absurdity have we descended, thanks to Magistrate Scerri Herrera’s picking and choosing as to what I am to be prosecuted for, when the crucial issue here is the perceived independence of the judiciary and what this particular magistrate might be doing to prejudice it.

A month ago, the outgoing chief justice gave an interview to The Sunday Times in which he said: “A judge or a magistrate acts in public but is not a public figure like a government minister. It is for this reason that the behaviour of a member of the judiciary must be such so as not to give rise to gossip. Gossip itself is harmful. Members of the judiciary should at all times keep a low profile in public. (…) If judges and magistrates do not keep a low profile and do things with the specific intent of showing off, they are putting their private life on the clothes line. It is important to know the limits of what one can do and what one cannot do.”

Chief Justice Vincent Degaetano was then asked by his interviewer whether this applied to their private life, too, and he replied: “Even in their private life off the bench. A magistrate or judge can, in his private life, gamble at a casino. But wouldn’t this harm his image and possibly that of his colleagues? Of course it would, because it is not the kind of behaviour you would expect from a member of the judiciary. It is not easy to say where the line of demarcation is. Very often, you would know when the line has been overstepped, when it has been grossly overstepped. Although members of the judiciary are entitled to a private life, they must behave in a manner so as not to give way to gossip or possibly scandal. Members of the judiciary need to keep in mind that not everything that is legal is necessarily appropriate.”

The theme was taken up by the incoming chief justice, Silvio Camilleri, who dedicated a good part of his speech to this matter at the opening of the forensic year the day before yesterday. The administration of justice does not depend only on courtroom proceedings but also on how judges and magistrates behave in society, he said, stressing that they are accountable even for their social behaviour and their behaviour in public life.

The new chief justice successfully made a point that I sometimes find myself at pains to explain to those who appear unable to understand it: that the security of tenure of magistrates and judges – they can be removed only if they are impeached with the consent of two-thirds of Parliament – is not a privilege afforded them so that they may behave as they please with impunity. It is a privilege to the citizens of Malta, who are thereby reassured that magistrates and judges are not subject to the whims and vengeful caprice of those who might otherwise remove them at will if they are displeased.

“It is an assurance that justice is being done,” Chief Justice Camilleri said. “This is why the independence of the judiciary is not independence from ethical rules and proper behaviour intended to distance the judiciary from any perception of wrong-doing and lack of impartiality.”

The wisdom imparted by the outgoing and incoming chief justices has always been clear in my mind. I can see that it wouldn’t be clear to those who have no proper understanding of the fact that magistrates and judges are not ordinary people, that they represent something much bigger and wider in scope than the strict narrowness of their duties in the courtroom.

What foxes me is that some incumbents see it as a job from which they can clock off to a private life conducted in public in an unseemly manner, for all the world as though they were, say, the manager of a supermarket.

I think it is fair to say that the ministry of justice should ensure, before appointments are made, that the appointees are fit for purpose. The systems devised many years ago for removing and disciplining magistrates and judges did not foresee situations in which individuals would be picked who are predisposed to disgraceful behaviour.

If you pick the right people at the outset, most of the problems are solved.

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