If you thought that asking for justice was the way you would get it, then you haven’t been paying attention.
Simon Busuttil is achieving one thing, if nothing else: he is exhausting all possible avenues in the pursuit of the application of the principle that justice is equal for all and that when someone in power gets caught red handed the consequences should be the same as they would be for anyone else.
The courts are refusing to pick up his repeated appeals for the evidence against Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Joseph Muscat and the Panama Gang to be looked into. Contrary to what Konrad Mizzi again said today in that smug ‘let me assume everybody’s stupid because everybody probably is’, the quality of the evidence and the merits of the case have never been looked into. Let alone dismissed or discarded.
The fact is the courts keep saying our laws offer no recourse when the police don’t do their job. If you control what the cops do and don’t do, you’re covered. Your victim has nowhere else to go.
You would at first feel that gutting feeling of deja vu, until Labour finds a new way of pissing on your predicament.
Robert Abela and Edward Zammit Lewis gave a press conference today to say Simon Busuttil suffered a “third legal knock-out” from today’s decision. Firstly, by definition, you can only be knocked out once. The fact that Simon Busuttil gets up again and again to fight back means these two smug bastards really don’t have their boxing right.
But the spin that seeking justice from institutions and demanding they do their job amounts to “attacking the institutions” takes this further than we’ve ever been.
Consider how these two parried the slump in Malta’s corruption perception ranking. When asked what caused this, their answer did not involve the fact that the Prime Minister was a wedding guest at an Iranian dodger awaiting trial for bank fraud in the United States; that his Chief of Staff and his Energy Minister set up secret Panama companies the first week after election; that their accountant wrote those companies would receive $5,000 a day from a company owned by the guy they would buy a power-station from; that they would pose with the most notorious dictator this side of the Pacific while his children laundered their money here; that they would sell passports to a thousand oligarchs and the prime minister’s chief of staff gets caught taking kickbacks; that the journalist that discovered all this ended up blown up in her car.
None of this slumped our corruption perceptions index according to this brace of hyenas.
But there is a reason for Robert Abela and Edward Zammit Lewis. And that is Simon Busuttil who, they say, best represents “the rise in political candidates running on a populist platform who seek to undermine democratic institutions and push anti-democratic agendas”.
They’re quoting from Transparency International’s report. They know full well that report is not talking about Simon Busuttil. It’s talking about them. It’s talking about Joseph Muscat.
It’s talking about the complete and utter collapse of the rule of law in our country which the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission decried with abandon and wrote as if writing about a Democratic People’s Republic of some iron curtain banana republic.
And then the lies.
“It should be pointed out that the government has already made important changes in this regard, when Prime Minister Joseph Muscat transferred the responsibility for appointing the judiciary from himself to a sub-committee,” Robert Abela said. Bullshit. The Venice Commission rightly pointed out that’s a farce, a cover which makes things worse because Joseph Muscat continues to have complete hiring powers for the judiciary but is covered by this “sub-committee”. Look at the way they dangle promotions from the Magistrature to the higher benches.
“The Venice Commission made reference to many structures which predate 2013, and which the PN did nothing about in 25 years,” Edward Zammit Lewis said.
Fair point. Goes back to a line Simon Busuttil used once and was made to regret. Our institutions should have been made ‘Labour-proof’, galvanised against the sort of abuse Labour inflicted on them in the 1970s and 1980s and again over the past five years. Now, alas, there isn’t even the comfort of looking forward to the alternative.
Simon Busuttil said today he’ll keep knocking on the doors of justice until someone lets him in. You’ve got to admire the guy’s staying power. Labour plays a lot with the idea that the call for truth and justice is a collective fetish of a small groupie fanbase around Simon Busuttil.
I don’t know about that.
What I do know is that if he, David Casa, Jason Azzopardi and a handful of others were not pursuing this in spite of all the odds, the mockery, the obstacles, and the institutional barriers built into this colonial system designed by a foreign power who wanted to lull us into thinking we ran our own affairs when they were the ones calling the shots, no one else would be.
But you know, that has to change. You need to be a politician to argue a matter in Parliament or in Government. But you don’t need to be a politician to argue a case with the Police, the Courts and the other institutions in thrall to Joseph Muscat.
You look at that mugshot of Robert Abela who looks like he can’t hold back his premature ejaculation and then you remember why we do this. Because, you fuckers, somewhere, some time, justice will be served.
We won’t go premature. We’ll stay and keep asking until we get the answer. That day we would not have undermined institutions. We would have freed them from the criminals that crowd them today like overgrown tumours. And when our institutions become free, we all will be free.
That day will come. We’ll bring it about.