Angelo Gafà’s gong from the French and Alexandra Mamo’s medal, ostensibly for bravery, from the Americans, must have some reason in someone’s book but it’s nothing anyone out here can see. Some other republic should give a medal to Victoria Buttigieg so we can complete a set of mysteriously decorated inadequates. We keep getting stories [...]

I want to say something about the case against Mark Camilleri for allegedly harassing Rosianne Cutajar. Mark Camilleri in this case is not merely facing a libel suit, not technically anyway. He is also facing prosecution by the police on the back of a complaint filed against him by Rosianne Cutajar. This is not just [...]

Iosif Galea has been arrested in Italy while on holiday with, among others, former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, on the back of a European arrest warrant issued against him by German police. Despite calls from the Opposition and other quarters, the Maltese police have not yet explained why they had not acted on Germany’s arrest [...]

I delivered this speech yesterday at the annual Medi conference organised by the Sant'Egidio community in Livorno Italy under the heading "Cities have a soul: The Mediterranean, a sea moved by history." The speech was in Italian. Scroll down for an English translation if you prefer. L’ultima volta che sono stato qui tra voi è stato [...]

For those of us of a certain age, who grew up watching Italian television, the Capaci and subsequently the via D’Amelio bombings in 1992 that killed anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino loomed large in our psyche. They were events that shook us and glued us to our television sets long before the emergence [...]

A delegation of the European Parliament’s committee responsible for the justice sector tried to meet the new Maltese justice minister Jonathan Attard during their visit to Malta earlier this week and though they finally managed to see him they didn’t hear him utter a word. Sources told this website the delegation of MEPs that included [...]

With a number of other journalists, I was invited by the MEPs from the LIBE committee who were here earlier this week to tell them what I thought about the progress Malta was making in aligning itself with democratic norms, particularly the rule of law. Their final question to us was what we thought they [...]

Charlie Hebdo's Laure Daussy writes this report about safety for journalists in Malta just shy of five years since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed. As is the style of the magazine the piece is accompanied by cartoons with a fascinating take on something that is as close to them as it is to us. At [...]

In the space of 24 hours, three European organisations came out with the same assessment of how far Malta has come since they first started looking closely when a journalist was killed by car bomb here. What Malta has done is nowhere near enough. Let’s be fair to Robert Abela. He has taken the issue [...]

Photo: REUTERS/Mark Zammit Cordina A committee of MPs in the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe’s highest human rights body found that “Malta faces important challenges to the function of its democratic and rule of law institutions, which, if left unaddressed could affect the level of democratic consolidation in the country.” The warning came with [...]

A civil servant regulates an industry. In the process she establishes a working relationship with the major investors of the industry. It should be clear that she doesn’t work for them. They have their own staff. She works in the public interest, administering the laws that regulate the behaviour of the economic players in the [...]

This is not going to be a popular one. New MP Julie Zahra brought her four-year-old daughter with her to do her homework (or whatever it is that passes for homework in the curriculum of a 4-year-old) in the Parliamentary chamber. She munched on a packed lunch as she scanned the chamber with her big [...]

Malta has scored abysmally in a Council of Europe evaluation on the implementation of recommendations to fight corruption. Of 23 recommendations Malta has only reached a satisfactory result in two and nine recommendations have not been implemented at all. Rapporteurs for the Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) said “further progress is necessary to demonstrate [...]

I hope you have been following Repubblika's social media posts during the visit of my colleagues Robert Aquilina and Alessandra Dee Crespo to Palermo as guests of the organisers of the memorial events marking the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Giovanni Falcone. That day in Capaci the mafia also killed Falcone’s wife Francesca Morvillo [...]

UPDATED: Christian Abela wrote in a reply to the below article. Click here for his reply. New minister Jo Etienne Abela, a Gozitan medical doctor running the active ageing ministry, has lost his chief of staff 3 weeks into his term. There is no official reason for the resignation of former head of secretariat Alex [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "Like the dawn of every new year, a new parliamentary term is the excuse to start afresh and forget about the past. The government members are behaving like re-invented virgins beyond reproach, even beyond the inconvenience of recollection. Tough luck. Here are outstanding issues hanging over from [...]

Your remains will soon be flown back to your home country where your mother and your family will be able to say goodbye and bury you. You came here for them. You left your home and your family so that you could send them some money and make their lives a little bit better. Two [...]

To borrow an Orwellian metaphor, it grates to see these pigs sleep in beds, even without sheets. Senior public officers are not allowed to campaign in general elections. The reason for that is expressly defined in the public service management code last updated earlier this year. “Ministerial and public confidence in the impartiality of the [...]

This is Ian Borg with his wife on a Ryanair flight to Turin this afternoon. They're not flying on a private break. Ian Borg is accompanied by some of his staff and heading a work delegation there. Italian law requires all passengers of flights terminating in Italy to wear an FP2 mask. The legal requirement [...]