Friday evening’s fracas at the Xarabank studios was the talk of the town yesterday, and for good reason. 

The country’s national broadcaster cancelled its most popular current affairs programme, which had been billed as a debate between the Nationalist Party’s freshly-elected Deputy Leader Simon Busuttil and Labour Party Deputy Leader Anglu Farrugia after the Labour Party chose to substitute its representative with the rebellious Nationalist MP Franco Debono, the very source of the government’s recent budget defeat and the precursor of an early election to be held in March.

That was certainly something to talk about, let alone Dr Debono’s questionable antics and vociferous outrage when the station refused to pit him against Dr Busuttil and summarily cancelled the show. The less said about that particular part of the episode, the better.

The Labour Party’s attempts to explain its way out what it had done by saying it wanted to give Dr Debono a platform to explain why he voted against the budget hold very little water, and the stunt amounted to little more than a cheap trick.

Yes, Labour pulled a fast one on the Nationalist Party and on Simon Busuttil and in the end it amounted to little more than a concerted attack on Simon Busuttil.  The whole sorry episode was absolutely out of order. And knowing Dr Busuttil, Labour’s accusations that he was afraid to face Dr Debono in a debate are utter nonsense.

Dr Busuttil was quite correct when he stated in the immediate wake of the incident: “If this is the Labour Party that wants to govern the country, the people have good reason to be worried.”

And if this is the kind of festive season political ceasefire that we can expect, one wonder exactly what will explode come 7 January when the cross-party ban on electioneering is lifted.

Blind justice

The current state of affairs in the judiciary is more than a little concerning. With one judge having resigned yesterday after the Prime Minister said he would be tabling an impeachment motion over his alleged involvement in some very dubious criminal affairs, and another facing separate impeachment proceedings, it is quite understandable that people are more than a little worried about whether justice in Malta is truly as blind as it should be.

Trust in the country’s institutions is already at something of a low ebb and when the members of the country’s judiciary is facing such serious accusations, people are now scratching their heads and wondering who, exactly, they can now trust.

After being filed in Parliament, the motions will be forwarded to the Commission for the Administration of Justice to investigate the allegations, after which the Commission will report back to the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The motions will then debated and voted on in Parliament, where a two-thirds majority vote is required for a judge to be impeached. 

And while the Labour Party has backed the government’s intention to impeach former Judge Raymond Pace who resigned yesterday after the Prime Minister announced his pending impeachment, it reserved judgement in the case of Mr Justice Lino Farrugia Sacco, who is accused of an Olympic ticketing scandal on charges levelled by the International Olympic Committee that are being disputed by the European Olympic Committees. 

One case, that of former judge Ray Pace, is rather clear cut and there is little doubt that there are grounds for his removal from the bench, but those being faced by Mr Justice Farrugia Sacco are not quite so clear cut and the Labour Party is quite right to reserve judgement at least for the time being.

There is absolutely no doubt, especially after the relatively recent fall from grace of a Chief Justice, that the situation has further undermined the public’s faith in the judiciary – faith that the country simply cannot afford to be undermined. 

Matters need to be set straight once and for all and as quickly as possible and the Chamber of Advocates was quite right when it expressed serious concern over the state of affairs yesterday. 

The Chamber appealed to both the Commission for the Administration of Justice and Parliament to respectively conclude the investigations and decide on the motions before Parliament is dissolved on 7 January − a call that should be fully supported across the board.