We first had the Justice Minister vehemently telling us that there is no point in including “femicide” as a separate criminal offence.

We already have the crime of voluntary homicide that carries the highest possible punishment, irrespective of who the victim is, Edward Zammit Lewis had said.

Legal amendments are not done as “a knee-jerk reaction”, he had insisted when asked for his opinion following calls for femicide to be added as an offence in our criminal law.

The calls were being made after a Polish woman was murdered in Sliema in the first weekend of the New Year. Paulina Dembska had been found murdered in a garden early one Sunday morning. Her alleged killer has been charged in court.

“The crime of voluntary homicide in Malta carries the highest possible penalty – life. Therefore, it is pointless to include another crime that also carries a life imprisonment term,” Zammit Lewis had told journalists.

There is so much confusion in the way the subject was being tackled, the minister had said. There was no need to change the law if there is already the highest punishment for voluntary homicide, whether it was a woman or a man who had been killed.

It would be easy for the government to amend the law to include femicide just “to look good”, he had added. But there can be no punishment higher than life imprisonment.

That seemed to be the best way forward. The murder of a man or a woman should be treated in the same way.

But fast forward a few days and, to some surprise, there was a change of heart.

Maybe it’s because the election is coming and the government wanted to “look good” after all, in spite of what the Justice Minister had said.

The subject seemed closed but, one afternoon, Prime Minister Robert Abela said in a Facebook post that the concept of family law would be included in the Criminal Code and, voilà, the next day a press conference was held in which the amendments to the law were explained – by the same Justice Minister, who a few days earlier had said there was no need for such changes, and by Equality Minister Owen Bonnici.

Hasty

It was immediately clear that the law had been drawn up with too much haste, and this is why it is believed that it is simply a vote catching exercise.

Many were those who asked: Why should the killing of a woman be given more “weight” in terms of the law than the killing of a man?

Why should a man found guilty of killing a woman be given a harsher sentence than if it was a woman who killed a man?

Aren’t we supposed to be speaking of equality?

Isn’t the life of a man equally precious as that of a woman?

What if it is a woman who kills a woman in what is a crime of passion?

If it is a woman who commits a crime of passion, why should she be given a lighter sentence than if it had been a man who commits such a crime?

Isn’t it discriminatory that the law distinguishes between the gender of the person who commits a crime, rather than rule on the extent of the crime itself?

Isn’t it discriminatory that the law also makes a distinction when it comes to the gender of the victim?

Today, we have women marrying each other – so will a man who kills his wife be given a harsher sentence compared to a woman who kills her wife?

Will the killing of a woman by her own wife be labelled as a femicide too?

And what if the love triangle is made up of three men, one of whom ends up being killed in a crime of passion? Would the life of the victim be less precious in the eyes of the law than if the love triangle involved three women?

"If we truly want a country which can call itself a land of equality, where women and men are truly equal, we have to make important changes in our laws, including those of a criminal nature," Minister Bonnici said at the presentation of the amendments to the law.  

But this is not equality. This is the opposite of equality, because these amendments will mean men could be given stiffer punishments if they commit a crime, than women who commit the same type of crime.  They will also mean that the murder of a man is considered less of a crime than the murder of a woman.

Just as much as it was wrong to have laws which discriminated against women in the past – such as when they were not allowed to vote in an election – it is wrong to consider the life of a woman as more precious than that of a man.

Discrimination is wrong from whichever angle one looks at it.

It is the same argument made against the law which was passed in Parliament some time ago to give extra seats to women in Parliament. Why should a woman who gets fewer votes than a man be given a seat in the House simply because she is a woman?

It is also the same argument made against the law which allows for a harsher sentence against a person who commits a crime against a gay person on the grounds of sexuality. That a straight person is given a harsher sentence if he punches a gay person than if it had been the gay person who punched the straight person is also discriminatory.

Legal heavyweights

Judges and lawyers poked more holes in the amendments put forward by the government. Their thoughts confirmed what laymen were thinking, and their legal expertise gave comfort to those who immediately saw that there was something wrong with the femicide law as proposed.

The law is “problematic from the discrimination angle”, Giovanni Bonello, a former European Court of Human Rights judge, charged. “It treats homicide committed by a man on a woman in a different manner from a homicide committed by a woman on a woman, or by a woman on a man.”

It goes against both Malta’s Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, which is saying something.

It means that if the government goes ahead with the law, it will be inevitably challenged in the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

Getting another black spot near Malta’s name on a European level, with the government guilty of discrimination, is something that should be avoided.

Lawyer Joe Giglio added more fuel to the fire. What if a husband cheats on his wife and it is the wife who kills the lover? Will she get a more lenient sentence because she is a woman who killed another woman?

The way the law was drafted ignores LGBT relationships, he said, adding that it has been recognised that gender is not only limited to men and women. This law is giving some people more rights than others.

A third lawyer, who did not want to be named, asked: “why can a woman be allowed to have a rush of blood while a man cannot? Why can a woman kill another woman and use that as an excuse where a man cannot? Like I don’t like women being discriminated against, I don’t feel men should be discriminated against, either.”

This third lawyer, just in case you’re wondering, is a woman.

Discrimination

Any violence committed against anyone, whether it is a man or a woman, should be punished depending on the crime committed, not whether the victim is a man or a woman.

We all agree that society should be doing more to reduce cases of domestic violence, both via education as well as by the authorities acting with more determination in bringing offenders to book. It is known that there have been cases when reports are filed, but lead to no consequences, with the result that the situation escalates, sometimes leading to serious injuries or, on occasion, even deaths.

We all agree that when perpetrators are found guilty, they should be punished for their wrongdoing and should not be let off with a slap on the wrist, which possibly gives them the courage to repeat the offence.

But by going ahead with this law – applying a harsher sentence to crimes committed by men against women (but not the other way round, and not if the crime against a woman is committed by another woman) – the government is enacting a sexist law.

The government is boasting that Malta will become the first country to introduce the concept of femicide in our criminal code.

But what it will be doing is making Malta the first country to enact a law that discriminates against men.

This is a dishonour that Malta should do without. Our reputation on the international stage needs to be enhanced, not degenerated further. After having a Prime Minister being given the title of the man of the year for corruption, a minister who was the only European minister to open a company in Panama and Malta becoming the first European country to be grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force, we do not want to become the first country accused, and being found guilty, of breaching men’s rights.

In his first comments when he was against the introduction of the concept of femicide in our laws, Zammit Lewis said the country should not go for a knee-jerk reaction.

Well, it took just a few days for this knee-jerk reaction to arrive. And it was one of the wrong sorts.