I was struck, this past week, by an opinion piece I came across on the online newspaper EUobserver following the publication of the Venice Commission's report on Malta. Although access was initially limited to subscribers, the article has now been made available to all users.

The thing that immediately caught my attention was the tone struck by author Andrew Rettman - a stark contrast to the reactions we've seen here in Malta. 'What reactions?' you may ask. Well, the usual party rhetoric, of course, with both the government and the Opposition downplaying or emphasising the report's conclusions. It was also quite difficult to get a fair summary of 37-page report from the local media, at least at first.

But first things first; the Venice Commission is a panel of jurists at the Council of Europe, and is considered to be the continent's main pro-democracy watchdog. In its report, the commission criticises what it describes as a concentration of power vested in the Maltese prime minister. Other actors and institutions, including the president, parliament, cabinet, judiciary and ombudsman - themselves dependent on the prime minister's approval - are in too weak a position to provide the necessary checks and balances, the report says. "The wide powers of appointment that the prime minister enjoys make this institution too powerful and pose a serious risk to the rule of law," it adds.

Now, all of this has long been known, with luminaries such as Judge Giovanni Bonello highlighting the issue. But successive governments, both PN and PL, have chosen to maintain the status quo, presumably because it suits them to. It is mainly a 'gift' from our former colonial overlords, kept in place and worsened by the successive Maltese governments.

We all tend to honour and acclaim past governments according to our political beliefs, but can we remember one, just one, which voluntarily shed some of this absolute power?

The situation now is much worse, as seen by overseas observers. Prime Minister Muscat enjoys the kind of absolute power that Poland's rulers and Hungary's Viktor Orban aspire to have.

The incumbent prime minister has the power to appoint judges and the chief justice, and although the principle is that the judiciary is independent and that the selection of judges and magistrates should be made upon merit and any undue political influence be excluded, the fact remains, we add, that most of the most recent appointments to the bench have gone to past Labour politicians, sympathisers, and hangers-on.

It is also the prime minister who picks the all-too-powerful attorney general and police commissioner. The attorney general acts as the prime minister's chief legal consultant, conducts prosecutions and even heads the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit, the country's anti-fraud body.

There is also the Permanent Commission against Corruption, but its members, who report to the justice minister, are also appointed by the prime minister, rendering it so ineffective that the Venice Commission recommends its dissolution.

It is the prime minister who has the power to hand out lucrative posts on parliamentary commissions to back-benchers, besides other top positions in the civil service. All these appointees have a financial incentive to comply with the prime minister's wishes.

The president plays a purely symbolic role, and Malta does not have an upper house of parliament. The prime minister, one may say, is the uncrowned king of Malta, as absolutist as the Grand Masters, if not more so.

Malta also has an ombudsman's office, as do other countries, but requests for information it makes are "frequently not complied with."

Throughout the nearly six years that Muscat has been in office, we  have seen an intensification of high-level corruption scandals, parallel to an economic boom based not on sustainable growth, but on Malta's online gambling industry and sales of EU passports to wealthy non-EU citizens.

"Revelations of kickbacks and shady offshore structures linked to his chief of staff and other senior officials have not seen anybody brought to justice or even lose their jobs," the report states.

Nor have the people who murdered the woman who exposed many of these corruption scandals, Daphne Caruana Galizia, been brought to justice. Nor was she adequately protected.

The EUobserver describes meeting a climate of fear in Malta, with former chiefs of police and FIAU members declining to comment, and former Leader of the Opposition Simon Busuttil saying he is afraid for his life.

But there is a problem, a big one for us. There are ongoing procedures to suspend the voting rights of Poland and Hungary. And claims of abuse of power in Cyprus and Romania have brought them under the EU's focus.

Although nobody has explicitly said anything along these lines, the overriding worry that Malta is too small to fit inside the EU structures keeps resurfacing.

Martin Kuijer, a Dutch expert who helped to write the Venice Commission study, told the Times of Malta, one of the country's few independent media outlets, that he did not envisage EU punitive measures against Muscat, in part due to the inherited nature of Malta's problem.

"I don't envisage this [threat to suspend EU voting rights] in the case of Malta," he said.

But a senior EU official told the EUobserver that EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova and European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans have mobilised their staff to conduct informal monitoring of the situation in the island state.

"They decided to keep the process below the level of [Jean-Claude] Juncker [the commission president]," the EU source said.

"The idea was that the EU should focus on Hungary and Poland because it cannot fight on too many fronts at the same time," he added.

"The EU cannot afford to have rule of law crises everywhere," he said.

The softly-softly approach might make sense in terms of EU politics.

But for some, Andrew Rettman says, letting people like Muscat off the hook undermines the bloc's credibility as a reformer outside its borders.

"In Pristina, the question every young person asked me was: 'Why is Malta a member of the EU no matter how corrupt and dangerous it is, while Kosovo is kept out no matter how well it behaves?'" journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia, Daphne's son, said on Monday after visiting Kosovo.

 

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