An internal investigation is underway in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over alleged misconduct by Malta’s ambassador to Ireland Giovanni Buttigieg. Female employees of the Dublin embassy have testified to an internal board to consistent bullying tactics and mismanagement by the ambassador in his running of the office. Witnesses told the board that they’ve been [...]

In April 2020, in the midst of the paranoia at the start of the COVID outbreak, the existence of Repubblika, then formally more than a year old, was finally recognised by Prime Minister Robert Abela and his government. He was never publicly heard to pronounce the organisation’s name before then. It was as if it [...]

I was careful in my two posts (this one and this one) about the abortion debate not to throw myself behind either side of the argument. And yet, certainly by the time I wrote a second article criticising aspects of the line taken by the Opposition, comments came in telling me that the absence in [...]

You will have seen reports (see here and here) of yesterday’s marathon court sitting that heard, from beginning to end, all the evidence brought by Repubblika and by the State in the case brought by Repubblika complaining its rights were breached by Nadine Lia’s refusal to recuse herself from hearing Repubblika’s complaint against the Police [...]

From my article in The Sunday Times today: "But given the mess we’re in in this country, given failing prosecutions against Pilatus Bank, given the return of Joseph Muscat – the dark prince of corruption – to public life, given that Yorgen Fenech is still cashing returns from the Electrogas contract, who’s reading the ombudsman’s [...]

I criticised the government for the poverty of its approach to a very complex, very important matter which they refuse, because of their spectacularly empty morality and their devious tactical gaming, to call it by its name:access to abortion. I was careful not to wade into the debate for or against abortion, while I risk [...]

A third of the time that social assistants in Gozo were supposed to be cleaning the homes of, or running errands for elderly people living alone, they were, officially, working somewhere else. Meanwhile elderly people were told the service they depend on to be able to continue living in the community was not available a [...]

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” [...]