Public criticism frequently targets our courts for their perceived weakness in imposing criminal punishments. For many offences, our legislature has lately increased the maximum and minimum parameters of punishment. Yet, the judiciary keeps such a minimum even lower in practice and inflicts a maximum punishment permitted once in a blue moon.

Prime Minister Abela, too, has more than once complained that the sentencing policy currently applied by the judiciary may at times appear as being too lenient. To up and strengthen his complaint, he even mentioned how he had a conversation to that effect with an unnamed magistrate who, apparently, subscribed to his views.

The whole point is to ensure people found guilty of serious crimes are given harsher sentences.

In this respect, one conclusion should be quite clear, namely that our courts must start applying higher standards of punishment and sentencing.

Talking of standards, what are we to make of many of the findings of our present Commissioner for Standards in Public Life?

In 2023, the Commissioner received 27 complaints. He found that 20 of these complaints did not warrant investigation or further investigation. Only a few investigations undertaken by the Commissioner resulted in a finding that misconduct had taken place. Three of these cases were not serious, so the commissioner closed them himself after receiving apologies from the persons investigated. How's that for good standards and best practices?

Azzopardi's first decision as Commissioner for Standards in Public Life was to decline to investigate Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo for initially obscuring documents confirming that Pierre Fenech was the CEO of two government entities simultaneously, earning €122,000 a year.

Shortly afterwards, Azzopardi also decided not to investigate Transport Minister Aaron Farrugia after he failed to attend parliament for questioning on the day a video showing a pair of Transport Malta officials beating a man in the middle of the road had gone viral.

On other occasions, he found no ethics breach in various ministers granting appointments to the spouse or romantic partner of another minister, even if he acknowledged that some of the appointments concerned may not appear to be examples of meritocracy.

In one particular instance, while officially acknowledging private WhatsApp communications between Minister Ian Borg and the Director of Licensing at Transport Malta concerning the issuance of driving licences, he opted not to pursue an investigation into the matter.

But perhaps the poorest standards shown by the Commissioner were when he inexplicably failed to investigate several points of great importance in declarations made by Labour MP Michael Farrugia in a meeting he had with Yorgen Fenech, who today stands accused of being a mastermind in the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

In the few instances that breaches were found by the Commissioner, the consequences were even more lenient (actually ludicrous) than punishments meted out by our courts. Simple apologies, admonition or reprimand were the most severe sanctions imposed.

I'll end this chapter on the Standards Commissioner by referring to when Prime Minister Robert Abela refused to apologise after he was found to have breached ethics through a publicly funded Facebook advert uploaded on the MaltaGov page, which was deemed by the Commissioner to be self-promotional.

Taking the cue from Robert Abela's refusal to apologise, how about when the prime minister insisted on an apology by disgraced MP Rosianne Cutajar for her to be able to return to the Labourite fold? No such apology was ever forthcoming, but Cutajar did somehow return to the fold. A clear case of two weights and two measures.

Moving on to our police corps, the latest GRECO verdict found that there is a need to foster the mechanism for the reporting of suspicions of corruption and other malpractice within the Maltese Police Force and to ensure adequate protection measures are in place for members of the Force when they report such instances.

Generally, while the Police Commissioner may brag about the increasing number of cases being solved, there have been glaring signs of falling standards in the force. The force must stop taking recruits with blots in their criminal record, acting against all norms of acceptable recruitment standards while showing that it has also fallen victim to the pervasive "anything goes" mentality. This does not reflect well on the police force.

The Attorney General's Office also does not escape some scathing remarks. We all recall how an inquiry board had criticised Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg for facilitating the signing of an agreement with Electrogas without parliament approval.

Her appointment was marked by controversy from the very start. In light of the institutional changes that resulted in the Attorney General's office being dedicated solely to criminal prosecutions, which inherently requires the holder of that office to have significant experience in the area, the present Attorney General does not have much, if any, experience in this area and indeed has not worked in this area at all. So much for expected standards!

Educational standards keep falling, while they are practically nonexistent within the Planning Authority.

Such falling standards also appear to influence some of the institutions long held to be bastions of high standards.

Oh yes, we are dangerously playing around with the standards expected of a modern democratic EU member state.

Mark Said is a lawyer