In 78 days, a new president should be sworn in. Just before that there’s Easter. Before that Parliament needs to meet and vote and appoint the new president. For the first time ever, the person will have to be chosen with the support of both sides of the house. So before that a consensus between [...]
Last night, a small number of MPs met with Justice Minister Jonathan Attard who is piloting the law which is all but abolishing temporary asset freezes for people charged with money laundering. They were going through what’s called ‘the committee stage’ which is when each individual article of the new law is debated individually and [...]
It’s been nearly three years since an inquiry set up by the government itself has found the Maltese state responsible for the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. It gave a long list of reasons for that conclusion and for each of those reasons a recommendation which the government has proceeded to ignore. One of those [...]
It is of some comfort that three most senior judges of the land were as unimpressed as we were with the arguments, such as they were, of the Attorney General Victoria Buttigieg and her lawyer the State Advocate Chris Soler that Repubblika’s complaint about Buttigieg’s decisions in the Pilatus case should be heard behind closed [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "A few days ago, the Degiorgio brothers, serving the dawning days of a 40-year prison sentence for killing Daphne Caruana Galizia, published through their lawyers what they swore to be the truth. In some places, their statement corroborates independent evidence and might very well be true. In [...]
This morning I spoke at a conference organised by the Faculty of Media at the University of Malta which discussed 'Disinformation, Misinformation and the Digital Environment: Challenges and Opportunities'. Here's what I said. “Is it actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again?” The Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr asked that question when [...]
This is a co-production with News. Let me know what you think. https://youtu.be/wM4GWKSjEvE
There’s no envying Robert Abela’s balls, caught as they are in Joseph Muscat’s squeezing grip. When Muscat was prime minister the government was run by a criminal gang. Now we have the only possibly worse scenario. The government is the hostage of a criminal gang. They finished the year removing temporary asset freezes for money [...]
Perhaps I'm too anal. This is the section of the prime minister's official website which introduces the cabinet of Ministers: (https://primministru.gov.mt/il-kabinett/) When you scroll down, the list of ministers continues, seamlessly, to include the ministers' parliamentary secretaries. Shocking as it may be to the parliamentary secretaries to learn this and despite what the prime minister's [...]
This is not exactly hot off the press. The Sunday Times published this on 31 December and I haven't uploaded it since. My excuse is I was on holiday. If you've missed it, you must surely have a good excuse. So here it is. "The European Commission’s 2023 (rule of law) report was scathing enough. [...]
Maybe it’s the weather, or maybe it’s the thought of adjusting after two weeks of holiday. I woke up today with an acute case of Monday morning blues. Maybe you have as well. But however dark your day is, it’s better than Aaron Farrugia’s. He’s newly unemployed. He can’t ride that grey Tesla anymore. And [...]
The government has filed an appeal seeking to overturn a decision by Judge Toni Abela that ruled my right to free expression was breached when as a journalist I was denied appropriate access to the prisons and other detention facilities to report on conditions in there. In the meantime, requests I made to visit [...]
It’s incredible to me that the courts are debating now, more than 6 years since Daphne was killed, how to protect the identities of the sources whose conversations with Daphne remained on her communications devices after her murder. This was always an issue. Hours after Daphne was killed journalists gathered for a march in Valletta [...]
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