In spite of being two separate institutions, the Ombudsman and the Standards Commissioner were linked together in a months-long saga which ended on Monday.

Parliament gave the go-ahead for the appointment of Chief Justice Emeritus Joseph Azzopardi as the new Standards Commissioner, while former judge Joseph Zammit McKeon was given the green light to take on the mantle of the Ombudsman.

There was an important difference in the appointment : whereas Zammit McKeon was approved unanimously, Azzopardi made it via a simple majority, with the Opposition voting against. The government wanted to have him so much that it changed the law to press ahead with his nomination. Despite his controversial appointment, Azzopardi did not help things by refusing to talk to the press after his appointment.

So much precious time has been lost in the meantime. For two whole years the Ombudsman’s office has been functioning with an interim head, Anthony Mifsud, whose term had expired in 2021. The work has been kept going but, as Mifsud himself admitted last year when it became apparent that it would have taken much longer for a replacement to be found, there was “uncertainty and demotivation” within his office. The protraction of the situation also made any planning impossible.

There was an even bigger vacuum in the Standards Commissioner’s office, which has been without a leader since last September’s resignation of George Hyzler to take up an appointment as Malta’s representative on the European Court of Auditors.

In his final press conference, Hyzler had warned of repercussions if a substitute had not been found. His words were not heeded. In these six months, requests for investigations have continued to be filed, but no work was carried out on them, which means that Azzopardi will be starting his term with a backlog of cases to investigate.

But other than the appointments per se, there is another issue which needs to be tackled. The problem, in this case, is whether the government really wants to do so.

We’re referring to how reports and rulings that are compiled or reached by both the Ombudsman and the Standards Commissioner are treated. Often, too often, they are shelved with no action taken and, if something does happen, then it is too little.

Last November, for example, in his annual report, Mifsud had criticised Parliament for consistently ignoring his office’s opinions about breaches in government departments. The relevant parliamentary committee had even failed to discuss his annual report for the previous year.

With regards to the Standards Commissioner, it is easy to note that each time Hyzler found a breach, Parliament’s Standards Committee had acted as a gatekeeper, in the sense that MPs who were found to have failed in their duties were defended by their party colleagues.

We have often suggested that the Standards Commissioner’s reports should not go before a committee made up of MPs, with the Speaker acting as chairman, but rather before a team of former judges who are politically neutral and who could, as such, take a more unbiased approach to the matter in hand.

Both institutions – the Ombudsman and the Standards Commissioner – have an important role to play in our democracy. But their efforts are turning out to have little effect to help change things for the better.

It all boils down to the fact that their power is limited. They can investigate, they can give rulings, but nothing much happens afterwards given the way that our system works.

This is what the government, with the support of the Opposition, should work on.

Because it is pointless to find people in breach, and then they still get to walk away, as if nothing has happened.