In the coming days, the credibility and accountability of the powers that be will be put on the line, as will the Opposition’s claims to the contrary, with two outstanding bones of contention beginning to be addressed – at least in part.

The first deals with the ongoing spate over army promotions, the Ombudsman and the home affairs ministry. The second is the same ministry’s launching of an investigation into The Malta Independent’s reports about the Police Commissioner’s cancellation of police charges against a man who allegedly assaulted four police officers in Zabbar last year.

On Wednesday, Parliament will debate an Opposition motion filed last week, after a call for an immediate debate was refused last week by the Speaker of the House, on the judicial protest filed by the Ombudsman against the Home Affairs Minister with respect to army personnel who allege they have suffered injustices in being overlooked in the past for promotions. 

The Ombudsman claims that the Ministry has not released the information needed for his office to conduct an investigation. The Ministry had filed a counter protest disputing the Ombudsman’s complaint, insisting that the army’s own Commission of Justice was the body that should entertain such complaints. In a nutshell, the ministry said that the Ombudsman has no authority to investigate complaints by commissioned officers as they had other remedies available to them.

Effectively, both bodies are fighting for the right to hear the cases of alleged injustice within the AFM’s ranks. But the rug was, however, seemingly pulled out from under the debate’s feet when news emerged yesterday that the army’s injustices commission has approved no less than 81 backdated promotions for AFM personnel – some whom had never even lodged a complaint before the Ombudsman but who were fast-tracked by the AFM’s commission.

This development will certainly not only complicate the parliamentary debate, but also the state of affairs between the Ombudsman and the ministry in their dispute over who has the power to look into the complaints.

In the second case, nearly two weeks since The Malta Independent broke a story on the Police Commissioner’s apparently strange decision to drop charges against a man who assaulted police officers, the ministry said on Friday that it had launched an investigation. 

The ministry has established an inter-ministerial investigation led by two director generals at the home affairs ministry and a retired judge. The results of the investigation will also be published, a ministry spokesperson told this publishing house on Friday – and rightly so, as we would have expected no less.

But, according the Opposition, such a non-independent investigation is nothing but a ‘prelude to a cover-up’. The Opposition has also called for an inquiry in line with the Inquiries Act, which this is certainly not.

The problem with both cases is that the government is basically calling the shots unhindered while at the same time ignoring proper debate – in the case of the upcoming Ombudsman parliamentary debate by awarding what must be the lion’s share of promotions due before the issue between the Ombudsman and ministry is even discussed in Parliament, and in the second case by not appointing a fully independent board.

At the same time, our calls last week for the re-establishment of the Permanent Commission Against Corruption, which has been defunct now for the last eight months, have been met with silence from the government despite all the past platitudes it has made about fighting corruption head-on. If these were actually more than platitudes, the government must re-appoint the Commission without further delay, and then go about reforming the Commission’s work.

Yes, that Commission has been virtually ineffective over the last 16 years and in fact not a single person had ever been arraigned by the police on the basis of the Commission’s investigations, despite the fact that the Commission had investigated some 425 cases since it was established.

But one would have thought that once in power this government would take the bull by the horns and give that Commission the impetus to do the job assigned to it. A reform can be implemented at any time and the work of the Commission does not necessarily have to wait until the government decides how, exactly, to reform it. 

These issues are some of the very building blocks of democracy, these are among the crucial checks and balances that any democratic country needs to have in place – means by which the police themselves can be investigated, by which the Ombudsman can carry out his work unfettered and with the full cooperation of the government, and by which citizens can register their complaints of corruption and have those complaints investigated if they are deemed to be warranted.

Anything short of that, unfortunately, gives the country the semblance of a totalitarian police state, which is most definitely not what this government had promised the nation in its election campaign.