I kept thinking and reading up after the post I wrote yesterday reacting to Jeremy Camilleri’s remark that when he was a journalist (he worked as a producer in the early 2000s for Lou Bondi’s TV show broadcast on the public TV station) “the Nationalists” wanted to send him to prison for 6 years.
Admittedly part of the reason I kept rolling this in my head was that the first version of my post expressed doubt on whether Jeremy Camilleri was saying the truth since no one I had spoken to until I published could remember the incident. When someone who remembered the incident read my post they called to put me right. Although the veracity or lack thereof of the incident was not the main thrust of the article I felt I had screwed up. It was a minor screw up but a screw up nonetheless. Which I don’t like doing.
I read in some detail what had happened in this story. Jeremy Camilleri worked on a TV show that challenged the quality of the security provided by the authorities to protect sensitive public areas.
This particular incident concerned Mnajdra temples. Until a few years earlier there had been no security whatsoever around Mnajdra. No one thought there had been any risk until at one point in the 1990s vandals, ostensibly in protest against regulations restricting bird hunting, sprayed over the Megalithic remains in an act of astonishing vindictiveness. After the temples were cleaned up, a fence was erected to protect them.
Jeremy Camilleri crawled in the middle of the night through a hole in the wire fencing (which he did not admit cutting out himself) and placed an empty box inside the temple making the TV argument that the box could have contained a bomb that would have destroyed a national treasure, and there was nothing and no one to stop him doing it.
The police spoke to four watchmen paid to guard the site but none of them saw anything. That was comically predictable, to be fair.
The security authorities watched the TV show that, if anything, criticised them for not providing adequate security. The police reacted by visiting the TV station to collect the tapes (a heavy-handed gesture under any circumstance) and proceeded to charge Jeremy Camilleri with “breaking”, using a “false key”, and “scaling”, which are legal terms for ramming your way into property which does not belong to you. The Attorney General later added the charge of damaging property, in reference to the hole in the fence.
It took six years of procedures for the case to finally be dismissed when a court ruled the police failed to prove Jeremy Camilleri cut the fencing himself.
Here’s how I assess this.
It was silly of the police to prosecute given that it was clear from the filmed evidence there had been no intention of causing any actual harm. It was especially silly to do it since the reporter had been investigating them for their failures and instead of learning from that they tried to punish him for it.
It was heavy handed for the police to rummage for evidence in a TV station. To me the sight of uniformed officers in a news station is utterly abhorrent though of course I acknowledge there may be extreme circumstances when this would be justified such as that a journalist is suspected of having committed a crime unconnected with their work and evidence of that crime could be at their office desk. This was not such a case.
Jeremy Camilleri and Bondi+ were doing their job as journalists exposing failures in the public administration. That’s just what all journalism should be doing, especially public broadcasting. If only we could have those days of snotty public TV back.
Six years of court proceedings with a possible prison sentence at the end (although given the triviality of the case that would have been extremely unlikely) are an unacceptable burden on a journalist just for doing their job and would have the chilling effect of discouraging the journalist concerned or others from pursuing such stories.
After examining the facts then, my conclusion is that Jeremy Camilleri is right to complain that in his case the state used laws to punish his journalism.
Having given him his due, I would like to develop the argument further because there are some wider considerations that Jeremy Camilleri did not make.
No one arguing for press freedom argues that journalists should be immune from prosecution when they break laws. Let me exaggerate here to illustrate the point. No one suggests I should be exempted from prosecution if I film myself murdering someone on the pretext that I was filming a documentary about murder and I am entitled to exercise my freedom of speech.
Criminal law applies to journalists as to anyone else and though prosecuting Jeremy Camilleri over the Mnajdra shoot was unnecessary and should not, in my view, ever have happened, it is deceitful to suggest that the application of criminal law on a journalist is in and of itself an abuse of free speech.
Though it is understandable that Jeremy Camilleri applied his own experience, the example he used for the argument he was making that the present government is more liberal towards journalism than “the Nationalists” had been is just wrong and deceitful.
There has been an occasion when a journalist was sent to prison for being a journalist, for something they wrote, as a result of the criminalisation of speech itself (not of some other criminal act in pursuit of the information translated into that speech). It only ever happened one in Malta’s history and it’s quite a chilling story.
Read Giovanni Bonello’s book for more details but I will refer to the case of Joseph Calleja who edited in the 1970s the PN’s satirical newspaper In-Niggieża. Calleja reported a government minister had a love child with a member of his staff. The police arrested him and the editor was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison which he served after the prime minister of the time, Dom Mintoff, openly threatened the judge hearing Calleja’s appeal with impeachment should he acquit Calleja.
The chilling effect worked. Calleja quit journalism and any public life for good after he was “reformed” in Kordin.
If we are going to discuss state-sponsored intimidation of the press we could refer to the 1979 sacking of the Times of Malta building in Valletta, the application of the Foreign Interference Act to hound international media, the way journalists were treated when they flew in to cover state events in the 1980s and that’s just to beat Jeremy Camilleri’s game of going back in history to find evidence of state-sponsored intimidation of the media.
But that’s not really productive now.
Nor is it productive to argue, as Jeremy Camilleri in his mealy-mouthed way seems to implicitly do, that journalists should have immunity from prosecution when committing crimes on the pretext that they were committing crimes to exercise their right to free speech.
What we need to focus on is how the state today criminalises free speech in and of itself. And I’ll keep it simple. There was one time when Christian Kaelin from Henley and Partners in an email asked “Keith and Joseph” if they would be OK if he SLAPPed Daphne Caruana Galizia in the UK for reporting on his passport selling scheme.
That time, when they said “OK by us” the Maltese State collaborated in an effort to crush a journalist (not in prison, but with a lawsuit that would cost more than she was worth) merely for writing what it was her duty to write. They, and their successors to this date, continue to perpetrate the same chilling effect by refusing to or failing to adopt adequate anti-SLAPP legislation failing in their positive obligation to erect that protection even after that failure was exposed by SLAPP threats and SLAPP suits that Daphne and others like myself were targeted with.
I could go on. A government minister got the courts to freeze Daphne’s bank accounts for reporting his failure of duty as a government minister. Minister upon minister filed libel suits against her and filed criminal complaints against her (that also had the theoretical application of prison much as Jeremy Camilleri’s charges for breaking and entering did).
And then, as an independent public inquiry found, the state created an atmosphere of impunity that enabled Daphne Caruana Galizia to be killed, a death sentence served onto her (and her family) for not having broken a single law in her life whether in pursuit of her journalism or as a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen of this country.
Having given Jeremy Camilleri his due, you will permit me now to refrain from shedding tears.