Wednesday evening's session at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was nothing short of an exercise in abject humiliation for the government and, by default, for the nation as a whole.

It was also an exercise in reaping fruits from the seeds we have sown during the long subordination of an entire country for the mere protection of two particular people who should have been defenestrated from the Auberge de Castille a long, long time ago if the government was worth its salt. 

But worth its salt it certainly is not, and as a result the country as a whole suffers one consecutive degrading incident after another.

Not only was the Council of Europe rapporteur's report on: 'Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination and the rule of law in Malta and beyond: ensuring that the whole truth emerges' endorsed by a massively overwhelming majority, but Malta's rather underwhelming performance at the hearing was the subject of widespread ridicule.

The head of Malta's delegation, MP Manuel Mallia, like his underling MP Rosianne Cutajar spewed venom and not much rhyme or reason in their argumentation.  Mallia, at least, did get in a fair amount of aerobic exercise thanks to the more than a dozen amendments he tabled to the report - all of which were shot down by large majorities - as he bobbed up and down from his seat to read out his amendments or to argue against others, all with a rather resounding lack of success.

Each amendment was shot down one-by-one, with hardly a soul to be found but a few Azerbaijani MPs to back up Malta's line of defence.  Azerbaijan, incidentally, is itself facing expulsion from the Council of Europe over the imprisonment of political activist Ilgar Mammadov, who was charged with criminal offenses and placed in pre-trial detention in 2013 without there being any reasonable suspicion that he had committed an offense.

Some friends we have at the Council of Europe.

Much was said and voted upon on Wednesday, and absolutely nothing went Malta's way, not even by a stretch of the imagination of the most fanatical and blinkered Labour Party acolyte.

But by far the most important recommendation from Wednesday's resolution is that the government establishes an independent and impartial judicial public inquiry into the circumstances of Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination within three month's time.

As her family said yesterday, 'He has nothing to fear but the truth.'

Over and above everything such an inquiry needs to cover is how the murder could have been prevented and, to our minds, that murder could have been prevented if the stories the journalist had published had actually been investigated by the authorities as they should have been.

That is because, had there been such investigations, those investigations would have served as a buffer between whoever it was that commissioned the heinous act and the journalist herself.

From a journalistic standpoint, and, more importantly, from the standpoint of the national interest, it needs to be established why, exactly, those scoops, particularly those that implicated people in the highest echelons of power, were never investigated. It needs to be determined why, when reports of misconduct of those at, and close to, the epicentre of power were drawn up that they were left to gather dust on successive police commissioners' desks.

Such an inquiry would serve to uncover what really happened as well as to determine whether that life could have been saved.

Not only the victims, the journalist's family, but also international bodies of high repute and Malta's opposition party - which is demanding a board of inquiry composed of a number of people known for their integrity and honesty with the chairman to be appointed by the Prime Minister after a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament - are all demanding this inquiry and the government has done itself and the country no favours so far by delaying and denying it.

Now it is up to the international community and the Council of Europe to actively monitor the government implementation of the public inquiry recommendation, and to ensure its members and terms of reference are truly up to international scratch.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, her family and the nation deserve no less.