Magistrate Nadine Lia on Monday rejected another recusal request made by the president of rule of law NGO Repubblika Robert Aquilina.

This is the second case in which Robert Aquilina has requested that Lia recuses herself. This case was in his name, whereas in the other case he was representing Repubblika, as its president, in the Pilatus Bank case.

Aquilina had already requested that Lia recuses herself from the Pilatus Bank case, but she had refused to do so. Following this, Repubblika has taken this recusal refusal to the constitutional court.

During the hate speech court sitting on Monday, Aquilina’s lawyer, Jason Azzopardi, asked Magistrate Lia to recuse herself from the case because because Nadine Lia’s father-in-law, Pawlu Lia, confronted Aquilina in Valletta to stop mentioning that Pawlu was Nadine’s father-in-law. Pawlu Lia is also one of the lawyers representing former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

Azzopardi said that Aquilina cannot have a fair hearing before Lia because there is a conflict of interest.

Lia asked the Inspector for his position on Azzopardi’s request, and he said that he agreed with Azzopardi’s request. To clarify, the court asked him whether this meant that he wanted Lia to recuse herself, and the inspector replied “yes.”

Lia then asked the inspector to quote the article of the law which would justify her recusal; however, he was not able to quote this off the top of his head. Lia ordered that this fact be recorded in the minutes and based on this fact she rejected the recusal request.

This court case came to be after Aquilina filed a police report against a threatening comment made against him on Facebook.

This comment was written by Joseph Schembri on a post made by Anton Rea Cutajar, who criticised Aquilina for holding a protest against the invasion of Russia into Ukraine.

Aquilina reported that it “incited violence and hatred” towards him.

The defence attorney, Joe Sammut said that these words are common in the south of Malta and that the accused did not really want to be violent or encourage others to do so.

The next sitting is on 16 January.