Two days into Parliament and the sparks are already flying.  With a breach of privilege complaint on day one and an opposition walk out on day two, if this tempo is maintained this promises to be one wild parliamentary season.

In a nutshell, the Prime Minister on Monday had taken exception to the Opposition leader’s accusations that he had had a hand in the police force having not arraigned Malta’s former EU Commissioner John Dalli over allegations of corruption and trading in influence – allegations that had led to his dismissal from the Commission.

The crux of the matter is that the former, pre-election, police commissioner, John Rizzo, testified in court last week that he felt he had enough evidence with which to arraign Mr Dalli while his successor, Peter-Paul Zammit, who took office a short time after Labour swept to electoral victory, had made it a point to announce he felt there was insufficient evidence to do so shortly after assuming office.

On the surface, this could be explained as a case of two commissioners and two different opinions on the soundness of OLAF’s case against Mr Dalli. 

Now whether the Opposition leader’s allegation that the new government swapped police commissioners so as to provide clemency from charges for Mr Dalli or not cannot be proved or disproved as matters currently stand, but the issue of parliamentary privilege is another matter.

Parliamentary privilege provides legal immunity to all Members of Parliament in terms of what they say within the House of Representatives.  The concept is to allow for a frank, no holds barred political debate in the country’s highest institution in the best tradition of democracy and freedom of expression.  But a breach of privilege complaint can be raised with the Speaker of the House if someone feels an MP has crossed the line of decency.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to parliamentary privilege. One holds that within the hallowed halls of Parliament MPs should be able to fully express themselves without fear of libel, or other charges, over what they say or reveal, and that MPs should be able to arrive at and express their ‘political conclusions’. 

The other school of thought holds that the rule should be scrapped because MPs should be held accountable for all they say in Parliament and should not use parliamentary privilege to say things that they would never repeat outside the House for fear of being hauled before the courts.

But one of the fundamental points in the current argument is that the Opposition leader did not seek the cover of Parliament, which resumed on Monday after its summer recess, to make the accusation.  He had, in fact done so in public at a highly publicised press conference last Friday.  And, as he pointed out, anyone who had felt libelled by his observations, made in a public and reported extensively, could have taken legal action there and then.

As such, the assumed allegation that the Opposition leader hid behind his parliamentary immunity is a moot point and the fact that a complaint over the accusations had not been made until it was repeated in Parliament, where the complaint would be heard by the ‘friendly’ government-appointed Speaker of the House and not by an otherwise impartial member of the judiciary in libel court, lends some weight to the Opposition’s stance.

The Speaker’s verdict was that, prima facie, the Opposition leader appeared to have breached his parliamentary privilege and that since he had not made an apology for the comments, the Speaker referred the matter to the House Standing Committee on Privileges to investigate.

The Opposition has cried foul, claiming that the government, with the complicity of the Speaker, is attempting to gag the Opposition.  That is quite obviously the point of any breach of privilege complaint, and there is nothing different about this particular case. 

The whole episode is somewhat uncanny, given the sheer amount of bile that those now in government once threw at those who are now in opposition when they were in government.  This is part and parcel of politics and the more the government seeks to silence the opposition on the matter, quite frankly, the more suspicious it looks, at least to the man on the street.

Outraged over the Speaker’s ruling, the Opposition walked out of Parliament in its immediate wake.  The Opposition leader has threatened to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights as a last resort form of seeking redress.

But given the situation, and in all fairness, the Opposition had no other route available to it after the Speaker’s ruling - it was to either walk out of Parliament or it would have stood to be walked over, not only on this particular issue but on every similar parliamentary polemic that may crop up.