Joseph Muscat and Robert Abela could be called to reply to a criminal complaint against them filed in The Hague if the International Criminal Court accepts to hear a case on Malta’s policy of pushing migrants at sea to Libya. The complaint, filed by German NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, alleges [...]
Not that a note from little old me is going to make anyone any difference. But I’d be mad not to join the mad reaction to the recent European Court of Justice ruling that says that publicly available Ultimate Beneficial Ownership registers are a breach of privacy and data protection rules. Malta was one of [...]
In this comment I’m not going into the merits of the law proposed by the government ostensibly to protect doctors from prosecution should they participate in the termination of a pregnancy that threatens the health of the mother. Not that the merits are not interesting or unworthy of analysis. I choose to think a bit [...]
During the long hours between killing his wife and being arrested the killer of Bernice Cassar held court on social media. He famously addressed a crass message to his newly orphaned children. I won’t reproduce it here. It’s enough that you recall that in the killer’s warped logic, such as it is, the ‘reason’ for [...]
Repubblika yesterday published a policy paper (download it here: Protecting Whistleblowers in Malta) in a series we’ve been running discussing specific aspects of the country’s system and how they could be improved. This time we focused on having a law that properly protects whistle-blowers and encourages citizens who become aware of wrongdoing, typically at work, [...]
There’s been another development in Repubblika’s court battle to get the Police Commissioner to act with some seriousness in the Pilatus case. Yesterday the constitutional Court of Appeal decided on the state’s complaint on a decision by the lower constitutional court to order that Nadine Lia is immediately replaced and another magistrate is chosen to [...]
The Constitutional Court of Appeal has ordered that Repubblika’s complaint that Nadine Lia’s refusal to recuse herself in the hearing of the organisation’s complaint against Police Commissioner Angelo Gafà is heard urgently by the Constitutional Court. The decision came after the State Advocate successfully appealed a decision of the Constitutional Court to re-assign the case [...]
The more we learn of the last months of Bernice Cassar’s life the clearer it becomes that the institutions and agencies directly responsible to protect her life failed to do their job and breached her very right to live. Times of Malta today gave more details of hours spent waiting at police headquarters, reports filed [...]
I was reading Claudia Calleja's timeline on Times of Malta that put together the months, weeks, and days that ended yesterday together with Bernice Cassar’s life, shot dead by her husband. I noticed a reference to the victim’s lawyer who represented Ms Cassar when in July the victim asked the court and obtained a protection [...]
I don’t want to write a post on the sadness I feel about a woman’s life cut short, about the life deprived of her ahead for her children, about the tension as the man who made them orphans is holed up in his house with the police outside. It’s not because I don’t care. Of [...]
Clyde Caruana yesterday congratulated the FIAU for its vision for the next four years, half-heartedly acknowledging that the “mistakes” that got us grey listed did happen but will not be repeated. In 10 years, the financial intelligence office staff has grown tenfold, its budget has proliferated by a factor of thirty. Surely now we have [...]
The government has proposed two motions to fill the vacant positions of ombudsman and commissioner for standards in public life. The two positions need cross-party consensus because the candidates need two-thirds of the House to approve their nomination. The opposition said they agree with the government’s nominee for the position of ombudsman. They nominated retired [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "A country which professes its democratic credentials but which denies people who pay its taxes a share in the decision making within it encourages the people with rights to exploit, abuse, and, when it comes to it, beat and kill people without any. "There are enough “foreigners” [...]
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It was another busy day in court for Repubblika yesterday. We recently met a law professor for some advice and when we asked him if we could see him in court he told us that though it’s true his life is all about law he barely knows the inside of the court building. We told [...]
Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi