The Labour elves are out in force on the internet comments boards to defend the person they consider (deservedly) one of their own – Magistrate Scerri Herrera - and to denigrate the person they consider to be Public Enemy No. 1 – me. That sort of thing only serves to remind me why Labour has managed to retain the support of around half the electorate no matter how low and shoddy its standards are. Many of its supporters do not know that Labour is not fit for purpose because they don’t even know what that purpose might be.
On Tuesday I testified under oath that Magistrate Scerri Herrera had had a long and secret adulterous affair with a police inspector, now superintendent, Dominic Micallef, that he had written her many letters, that she had hidden those letters at a location other than her home so that her husband would not find them, that she left those letters there when she embarked on another adulterous affair with Robert Musumeci and then moved in with him, and that the reason for the delay in her reaction to my blog-posts about her behaviour was not merely that she was in Singapore with another policeman looking into the murder of a sailor aboard a Malta-flagged vessel, but that she and Police Superintendent Dominic Micallef were trying to get hold of the letters before I was arrested.
Once they got hold of the letters, which constituted evidence against them both, Magistrate Scerri Herrera put in a formal complaint with the Police Commissioner and I was arrested. I returned from an evening out to find four policemen – the full squad complement they send to perform a difficult arrest – standing waiting at my gate at 1.30am, with a formal request to be at Police Headquarters at nine the following morning.
The tragic thing is that I wasn’t surprised. We are all equal before the law, but if you or I or even the prime minister files a complaint about criminal defamation, the Police Commissioner is not going to send four policemen to stand and wait outside your door half the night to get you for interrogation. You would have had to have a secret affair with senior police officer to get that kind of special service. So much for the separation of powers, when a magistrate yelps and the police jump to obey.
During interrogation, I was held under arrest for four to five hours and was not permitted to leave even after I had given a statement. The police, while they held me, were trying to get hold of the owner of the company that hosts my website, to get details of the people who administer it (me). They told him that they had a person under arrest and would not let the person go until he told them what they wanted to know. He realised at once that I was the person under arrest and he gave them my name. Then they let me go.
Has that ever happened to me in 20 years of writing? No, it hasn’t. It did happen to me under Labour – snap – but that was another story. I have never found four policemen at my gate at 1.30am because of something I wrote about somebody. I have never seen the police under such pressure for a defamation suit, or in such a terrible panic. The policemen at my gate behaved as though I had murdered someone and they themselves looked worried sick.
And that is the point that the Labour elves on the internet have missed. If the concrete wall that separates the police and the judiciary can break down with prejudice to one citizen, it can break down for anyone and at any time. I am a public person and anything done to me is done in public. And yet still they do this. Imagine, then, what scope for abuse there is for people who are under the public parapet.
Here we have a situation where a police superintendent and a magistrate have something on each other and used their common interest in keeping their affair hidden to collude in removing evidence in a case in which the magistrate is directly involved. There are three reasons why the police superintendent and the magistrate wished to keep this hidden. They hadn’t told their spouses (obviously), they wished to conceal evidence that would help me defend my position, but beyond that, they know (he certainly does even if she does not) that it is a grave offence and serious breach of ethics for a prosecuting officer to conduct a clandestine relationship with a member of the judiciary.
The Labour elves think it is just another affair and that it is nobody else’s business. Because this magistrate is a sister to the man who will be justice minister in 18 months, they defend her dreadful behaviour and pretend to themselves that it is normal. I can’t help saying this, but with true believers like that, no wonder the Labour Party gets such an easy ride while the Nationalist Party is tortured to death over the slightest misdemeanour.
They are clearly oblivious to the democratic requirement of the separation of powers, and completely in the dark as to why those powers must be separate. They probably don’t even know what the powers at issue are, and might even think that the police and the judiciary are part of the same ‘power’ and work hand in hand.
The judiciary, the executive, the police, parliament and the media are the pillars of democracy. They must function independently of each other if democracy is to be kept safe. We already have a grave situation in which the media does not act to scrutinise the judiciary because it is that same judiciary which then tries it in court on matters of defamation and libel, the net result being that certain magistrates and judges do exactly as they please.
Perhaps I had better spell it out. Clandestine affairs between senior-ranking police officers and members of the judiciary are not allowed in a properly functioning democracy because the potential for abuse is great. This has been illustrated in my own case. Any relationship between a member of the judiciary and a police officer must be out in the open, above board and subject to scrutiny to ensure that there is no abuse of power.
But it is not only police officers who a magistrate cannot sleep with secretly. Any such secret affair is not permissible. I illustrated the reason why – for those who might think, childishly, that ‘it’s nobody business’ – under oath yesterday. Faced with a case involving a family member or other close associate like an in-law, a magistrate is obliged to abstain in the interest of transparency in the administration of justice. If a magistrate is sleeping in secret with the brother of the person in the dock before her, not only will she not feel the need to abstain (because others don’t know of the relationship) but she cannot abstain even if she wants to, because then she would have to give her reasons and reveal her adultery.
When Magistrate Scerri Herrera sat in judgement over Robert Musumeci’s brother Joseph, when he was prosecuted for theft, she did not abstain because her relationship with him was still a secret and neither of their spouses knew. So Joseph Musumeci’s case was heard and judged by his brother’s lover. Magistrate Scerri Herrera’s lawyer argued yesterday that the Attorney-General did not appeal against her judgement. I said to him that this is not the point. To suggest that it is all right for a magistrate to judge her lover’s brother as long as the judgement is within the law is patently absurd and runs contrary to the accepted norms of justice.
If you don’t think that’s disturbing, or deeply wrong, then it’s time for you to pack your bags and head for China. That kind of view is not liberal but its precise opposite. It is the denizens of totalitarian regimes who accept this kind of thing and think it normal.