I never cease to be astonished at the way Members of Parliament can reconcile in their minds (and square with their consciences) conflicts of interest which are outrageously obvious, and obviously outrageous, to others out here in the forum.

There are many such examples, but I’m going to stick with the latest.

Nationalist MP Franco Debono has, to his credit, secured a landmark ruling in court on the matter of a detainee’s access to a lawyer during interrogation. The court ruled – not that it needed to, because there are sufficient judgements by the European Court of Human Rights in this regard, but there you go – that detainees must have access to legal counsel, and that if this is denied them, then the process by which they have been brought to trial is unsafe.

The natural consequence of this ruling is that trial after trial has collapsed.

The police began allowing detainees to consult a lawyer only at the start of last year, and still it is before interrogation and definitely not during. This means that when a not-particularly-bright or very young and naive person is under interrogation, he does not have a lawyer sitting by his side to say ‘don’t answer that’.

If you think this is fine, then you are working on the assumption that everybody who is interrogated is guilty of having ‘done it’. That is far from the truth. The sorry reality is that some interrogating officers are motivated by the desire to obtain an incriminating statement rather than the facts.

Now Franco Debono has taken his laudable legal and human rights success one step further. Having brought about the collapse of a few trials on these grounds, he is working to use the same ruling to release prisoners from gaol.

The first of these is an accomplice to murder, George Pace, who so far has served only a few months of his 30-year prison sentence. He has claimed through his lawyer Franco Debono that his human rights were violated because he was not allowed to speak to a lawyer before the police took his statement years ago.

The murder – in which Nazzareno Ebejer was shot point blank in the head and chest − took place in 1989. Carmelo Sant, the man who actually shot him, confessed before standing trial and was given a 30-year sentence as well.

I suppose it is only a matter of time before he claims that his human rights were violated, too, and demands “an effective remedy” of the Constitutional Court.

As a lawyer, Franco Debono is working extremely well in his clients’ interest. He is doing what he is paid to do, and he is justified in his satisfaction with the outcome. So are his clients. The police have got what they deserved for refusing access to a lawyer in defiance of ECHR rulings, but society is now paying the price too.

As a Member of Parliament, though, things are more than a little different for Dr Debono. In Parliament, he does not represent his clients but his constituents. Of course, some of his clients may also be his constituents, but that does not mean that their special vested interests should eclipse the public interest. It is not in the public interest to have accomplices to murder, drug dealers and the like released from prison unless they are innocent. It is not in the public interest to have trials collapse after prolonged investigations and the accumulation of evidence, unless the person in the dock is innocent.

Nor, of course, is it in the public interest to have a situation where human rights are violated by denying detainees any access to legal counsel.

Franco Debono will, it goes without saying, have started from the point that, because George Pace had no lawyer when he was interrogated, then the police obtained his statements under duress and that those statements are false. At least I hope he did, because I would have serious trouble accepting a situation in which Dr Debono knew the statements to be true but still thinks Pace should be released from prison through the large loophole that has been opened up retrospectively in the law.

There are two schools of thought as to whether lawyers should try to get their clients off the hook even if they know they did it. Some people think that a lawyer’s primary (even only) duty is to his client and that he should do whatever it takes to help him stay out of jail.

Others think that a lawyer’s duty is to see justice served. I belong to that school of thought, even though I can see that the defence lawyer who knows beyond doubt that his client has, for example, defiled boys in his care cannot very well say ‘Right then, you’ve got to plead guilty and go to prison where you belong. That will be €10,000, cash and no cheques.’

This is a moral dilemma which many defence lawyers are able to resolve, which is good, as otherwise there would be nobody left to defend those who are manifestly guilty, and we would have even more human rights violations.

But Members of Parliament who are also defence lawyers – and they include Jose Herrera, who will be minister of justice in 18 months’ time – have a different sort of moral dilemma which appears not to bother them at all.

I have always been uncomfortable with the fact that so many criminal defence lawyers have taken up seats in Parliament and even in Cabinet over the years, causing several difficult and even dubious situations. It can never be a good thing for Members of Parliament – or any sort of politician – to have close links with criminals and, through this line of work, with the police, even if those links are strictly professional.

Through past experience we know that professional relationships of this sort can sometimes become cordial, and that hardened criminals can develop a dedicated devotion to the politician-lawyers who take up their brief and deliver. The consequences are inevitably unsavoury.

The failure to understand conflicts of interest bothers me more than the result of that failure. During the Cyrus Engerer debacle, it turned out that Franco Debono, through his law office, knew that Engerer faced police prosecution for stealing and distributing, with malicious intent, his former lover’s private photographs, even when the Nationalist Party did not. I spoke to Dr Debono when I discovered this, and told him that his conflict of interest was so great that it had bells on.

As a lawyer, he was bound over to keep his clients’ secrets. But as a Member of Parliament and politician for the Nationalist Party, he was obliged to disclose to the party secretary-general any information that would cause political harm if withheld. In other words, as a Nationalist MP he was obliged to tell the party secretary-general that Cyrus Engerer was under police investigation, but as Engerer’s lawyer, he could not.

Dr Debono could not understand this. “I was doing my job as a lawyer,” he said. “Of course,” I replied, “but that meant you weren’t doing your duty as a member of the Nationalist Party, or even as the representative of your constituents, who would have wished to know that Mr Engerer is about to be prosecuted.”

We argued in circles and got nowhere, until we parted on cordial terms and I went off to make a soothing mug of builder’s tea. I really needed it, I can tell you that.

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