With Parliament reconvening tomorrow and with the government planning, as one of its first acts of the new parliamentary season, to abolish the legal concept of criminal libel, we would like to bid a not too fond farewell to this vestige of different times when freedom of speech and freedom of the press carried far less significance than they do today.

It is not because as a newspaper that is continuously pushing the boundaries and raising the game in the Maltese media stakes that we are in full favour of wiping criminal libel from the statute books.  It is not because we as a newspaper are threatened with criminal libel regularly, or because we have recently been treated to criminal libel proceedings, that we are against the concept of criminal libel.

We are against the very ethos of the country’s criminal defamation laws and in favour of them being replaced with more appropriate civil defamation laws because criminal libel has absolutely no place in today’s society. Its place, if there ever was a place for journalists to be threatened with prison sentences for their articles, is behind the Iron Curtain.

As a newspaper that has had its fair share of criminal defamation threats, we may seem a little biased on the subject, but the fact of the matter is that criminal libel laws, which could see journalists imprisoned for the content of their work, is a relic of the past that has absolutely no place in any modern democracy. The Council of Europe, the United Nations and most Western democracies are in complete agreement.

Let's be clear: criminal libel laws are not used to protect anyone's reputation, they are used to silence criticism and to gag the press. The latest criminal libel charges that this newspaper has been subjected to, as reported in today’s issue, is one such case in point. It is one in which we have the perpetrator of the Libyan medical visas scam and his lawyer, a short-serving and recent Commissioner of Police, attempting to intimidate this newspaper away from digging deeper into the racket.

Their efforts to silence us – we can assure Dr Peter Paul Zammit, Mr Neville Gafà, our readers and the public at large – will certainly not yield the result they are looking for.

Maltese politicians routinely use the spectre of criminal libel in their attempts to gag the media. Recent research carried out by another section of the media showed there were 36 criminal libel cases filed by politicians and political functionaries in 2014 – meaning that on 36 occasions politicians were willing to see journalists and others imprisoned for their writings – in a clear violation of the basic tenets of democracy and freedom of speech. 

In most of these cases, politicians had not even availed themselves of their legal remedy of a right of reply as prescribed at law under the Press Act, in which a media outlet is obliged to give equal prominence to a reply from a person who feels they have been mistreated in the press. Nor have they, in most of these cases, availed themselves of civil court remedies where monetary damages can be awarded to an aggrieved party.

Instead they go straight for the jugular in their bid to squash freedom of speech, when freedom of speech does not suit their agenda. These people need to understand that politicians and those who opt for public life or public service are naturally subject to a higher level of scrutiny. In 1986, the European Court of Human Rights set an important milestone in this regard, having ruled that the limits of acceptable criticism were wider for politicians than for private citizens.

The difference between civil and criminal is simple: criminal libel laws are laws that make it a criminal offence to say something that undermines someone else’s reputation. Civil libel laws are a proportionate way to deal with such reputation management issues. But criminal libel laws are often disproportionate – the police get involved, they arrest a journalist, make a criminal prosecution and the journalist could end up in prison and with a criminal record.

This situation is completely unacceptable and it should no longer be tolerated in a free country.

When Parliament reconvenes tomorrow, the government will begin the process of removing criminal libel from the statute books, after a bill to decriminalise criminal libel was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers.

And while it almost a surety that the bill will pass through Parliament unanimously, those who have taken this long-needed step deserve to be commended. It is, after all, high time that politicians took this step to drag the country out from behind the Iron Curtain and into the 21st century Western world in this respect.