The press is not governed by the rules that govern the law courts
In The Times today:
Defence lawyer Jose Herrera complained there were various blogs on the internet, including one by Daphne Caruana Galizia and two on timesofmalta.com, saying that this was a racist attack.
Mr Deguara was being judged by journalists and this was unacceptable in a democratic country. This was seriously prejudicial to his case as commentators had already concluded he was guilty of a racist attack before hearing a shred of evidence. Dr Herrera said he was not referring to the articles but to the comments
Magistrate Lawrence Quintano said that although he understood one’s right of the Freedom of Expression, according to the Maltese Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights, the accused was innocent until proven otherwise.
The judicial process was still at the very beginning and he warned commentators to choose their words carefully and not to draw conclusions.
That the accused is innocent until proved guilty is a rule of procedure. It governs the system of justice from the moment of arrest through to prosecution. It does not govern the press.
The lawyer and the magistrate might believe that the right of the accused to a fair trial might be prejudiced by discussion of the case in the media. This, however, has nothing to do with the presumption of innocence until guilt is proved.
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Alla biss huwa fuq kollox u fuq kulhadd.
Biss, jien naqbel li gurnalist jikteb dak li jhoss minghajr ebda tfixkil ta hadd. Min joghgbu jaqra. jien naqra kollox u naghmel opinjoni ghalija.
Il-lum hawn provi li l – qrati zbaljaw fil gudizzju taghhom ukoll.
grazzi.
Mela kif jkun attakk razzista?
When will our rock emerge from the Dark Ages? The internet is free, in all senses of the word.
I agree that the internet should be free from any form of censorship. One is of course also free to file for slander, calumny, illegal content etc. This is especially easy when the originator of said content is known.
If our legislators are making it illegal to even view some sort of pictures on the internet it should also be made illegal to read articles/ blogs/comments/ fiction that break any laws.
As things stand in Malta if one wilfully or not views on his computer a photo of a 17-year-old bare-breasted girl one may be accused of possession of child pornography. (PCs and ISPs store such info).
[Daphne – Seventeen-year-old girls can in no way be classified as children. They are minors, but not children. Post-puberty, girls cease to be of interest to paedophiles, though they remain of interest to grown perverts of another sort, like Italy’s prime minister.]
Meanwhile I have never heard of any case of anyone being prosecuted for viewing/reading racist, slanderous, spiteful writings: including such things as how to prepare bombs, how to cheat in your tax return, how to bring down legitimate governments, how to hang negroes, incitements towards vandalism etc.
Child porn in Malta is classified as anything that is obscene, explicit .. etc involving minors. As our laws of age of consent stand, a woman (or man) of 18 years minus 1 day is considered a minor and the owner or worse still ‘taker’ of such pictures is considered a child pornographer.
[Daphne – No, he isn’t. He can be charged with corruption of minors, but not with the production of child pornography. Seventeen-year-olds are not children. All children are minors but not all minors are children.]
It also of course depends much on the presiding magistrate with wildly differing sentences being given for similar crimes.
One of your most widely read and commented upon blogs (how flies flock to a putrid carcass!) involves someone who sent explicit sms s to children. The fact that he was convicted of child molestation is also mentioned in international fora in the sense that in Malta molestation can also be a simple sms. Again…. it all depends on the magistrate / judge. (As does the definition of what is or is not adult pornography)
You might remember for example a magazine called ‘play pen’ produced and photographed in Malta. Notwithstanding the demand for such material I think it only survived one or two issues.
I must disagree with you on another point. You call men who are sexually interested in 17 year old women ‘perverts’. As far as I know you studied anthropology. I do not know whether you studied ethology and what it has to say on sexual selection. I will not go into it here. It is enough for me to say that the present western culture of getting married and making children when one’s in one’s thirties or even later is (from the biological point of view) an aberration.
I will not speak of what psychologists and social workers and their ilk say as I do not consider what they practise as being in any way based on solid science.
Whether we like it or not we are apes – hominids if you like. But animals none the less. Yet often one learns more about a society when one looks at what one is not allowed to do rather than what is considered acceptable.
So without going into the political merits etc… Berlusconi, biologically speaking, is certainly not a pervert. Neither is any man who prefers to look at pictures (or maybe go beyond) of women who are able to procreate ( any age from let’s say 14 to 50)
The same applies to women too off course but sexual selection takes on a different aspect there.. as women have more to lose. By ‘women’ I mean females of any reasonably advanced animal species.
[Daphne – Believe me, sugar: any grand-daddy who ogles 17-year-old girls is a pervert, and the ability to procreate has nothing to do with it. Ask any 17-year-old girl who’s been on the receiving end. Just as a side-note, grand-daddies start at around 45.]
I did just what you suggested and asked a youngish female. A 17 year old was not at hand so I asked a 20 year old law student whether she’d think an old rich and powerful man a pervert if he made advances. She said ‘definitely not!’ I next asked a woman of 60 if she thought a man of 70 who ogled a 17 year old to be a pervert and she said ‘definitely yes’. You’ll find that women who are past their reproductive age become bitchy about younger women and the men attracted to them.
[Daphne – No, dery. It’s just that women of 60 have lived longer and have far more experience of life and men than girls of 17, who know nothing of either. However, they’ll learn fast. Ask your question again of the same girl, but take care to remove the qualifiers ‘rich’ and ‘powerful’ and her reply will be ‘yes’. Young women find old women physically repulsive in exactly the same way that young men find old women physically repulsive. It would take a man not to see this.]
That is when words like ‘pervert’ are thrown about. You must remember that in Berlusconi’s case it was his wife who made public his escapades with the 17-year-old. (Incidentally in Italy the age of consent is 14 so even if he had had sex with her when she was 17 he’d not have done anything illegal. In Malta it would have been another matter).
[Daphne – You have a lot to learn.]
Some people use the word pervert too loosely – a pervert is someone who has sex with his mother or who has sex with little children.
[Daphne – See my comment above.]
It is very natural and not at all perverted for older men (and I suppose women) to at least fantasise about a healthy 17 year old.
[Daphne – My experience of life has taught me that when middle-aged men fantasise about teenage girls it’s because they can’t cope with women. The ‘teenage girl’ fantasy is not about the body – after all, plenty of women keep the same body up to the age of 30 – but about the ‘blankness’, the unquestioning nature, the ‘easiness’. And no, grown women don’t fantasise about 17-year-olds. They fantasise about George Clooney, who is anything but.]
From Chapter 9 – the Criminal Code of Malta
“(1B) Any person who acquires or is in possession of an indecent
photograph, film, video recording or electronic image of a minor,
shall, on conviction, be liable to imprisonment for a term not
exceeding two years.”
Just happening upon a website of a bare chested 17 year old woman in Malta is therefore illegal. (Visited website data is stored on PCs and ISPs) Whatever you say Daphne – the person will be labelled a paedophile – if not by the magistrate then by people’s opinion once the courts allow his name to be made public and media give in to the public lust for gossip and publish his or her name.
[Daphne – Not really. Magistrates have leeway in the interpretation of the law, and no one is going to be sent to jail for keeping a picture of a topless girl of 17. But just to be on the safe side, make sure your topless ladies are over 18.]
The magistrate’s warning to commentators could be a dangerous precedent. What next? Shall it now even be forbidden to discuss with friends over a cappuccino some case which happens to be in front of the judiciary? Will ‘conventional wisdom’ be banned? The magistrate should instead have told off Dr. Herrera, and not encouraged such feeble excuses. Big Brother coming of age?
I believe in absolute freedom of expression – but I also believe (I know it’s a cliche) in being, by civilised choice, nice to others.
It is one thing writing about how Mugabe slaughtered school children for not wearing the right school uniform and it is another thing altogether when one writes about philandering etc.
For example with one’s children, whatever the background and upbringing, one never knows how they will turn out. So what might seem scandalous today to me might be something my son might be doing next year. Then I am sure that I will have a completely different perspective on the private goings on of others.
TVM in English has just reported that “a drug addict collapsed on the dock”. If I’m not mistaken, even The Times had headlined that this happened “on the dock”, but they have since corrected it. Clearly, TVM copied it from the Times before the correction took place.
I heard this – and, because of the usual impeccable pronunciation of the newscaster, it sounded like “a drug addict collapsed on a dog”.
This week, the Italian programme Porta a Porta discussed the arraignement of a man after nineteen years that his girlfriend was found dead. It was a very open discussion and the court case hasn’t even started. This would not be possible in Malta. Is it because we have different laws or is it due to the interpretation of our laws?
Why are people being warned not to express concern that this, and other incidents, were driven by racism? Was the warning also addressed to the individual who thought that this incident “serve(d) as a good lesson for the immigrants who are residing here to take there ass back to Africa”, I wonder?
It’s all pointless, really. If the magistrate is concerned that his judgement may be compromised, he could stop reading this blog and timesofmalta.com
I think the restrictions are mainly aimed at jury trials, rather than trials before a magistrate.
And I think it is something we inherited from the British system, rather than something inherent in our “Napoleonic” legal system.
The club where this allegedly racist attack took place is always heavily frequented by black people, including immigrants. If the latter are well dressed, well behaved and do not cause trouble they are admitted. If not, they are not, as with any Maltese or other national regardless of skin colour.
It is also true that the doormen may not admit a large group of single men of Arab or African origin – surely many Maltese young men holidaying abroad have also experienced this? I experienced this many times on the Athens riviera, and my mates were German and Greek. In Brussels there are clubs where I do not bother to go because there is a ‘guest list’ – is this racist?
How many of the people claiming that this was a racist attack are aware of these trivia? Stop being so naive and infantile – are your lives truly so devoid of drama that you have to conjure an image of the 1950s American South in 21st century Malta? The issue here is one of proper certification and training of doormen, and I say this without alleging that the doorman in question was in any way at fault for the unfortunate death of this illegal immigrant, who was described by his own companions as being drunk on that night.
Today any chimp who goes to the gym can become a bouncer, and this is not right. Let the courts decide this case. The immediate reaction of many that this was a racist attack sticks in my throat. I am also bitterly amused that the internecine bickering amongst the Somalis in yesterday’s march against racism has caused surprise amongst many of the very naive, and relatively few, Maltese nationals taking part.
Anyone who has actually lived in Europe will think long and hard before labelling Malta a racist country because the reality has a lot of nuance in it! We all know that believing X is inferior because his skin is black is wrong and disgusting. But that is not why a lot pf people are being labelled as racist these days. Under the onslaught of well-intentioned laws and the misguided open door immigration policies of the last few decades of the last century, fear and anger in Europe is now rampant.
The fact that it takes the form of ignoring the foreigners who do not integrate, pretending that they are not there and avoiding their neighbourhoods, does not mean it does not exist. I have seen this most clearly in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In the latter country, what was once the most liberal country in Europe is no longer that, as the Dutch have realised that more than half of the next generation in all the major Dutch cities will belong to ethnic minorities, including a large Muslim community that has not integrated into the Dutch way of life as was expected.
The joys of multiculturalism? Sell that to the poets. Illegal immigration is a taboo subject at dinner tables, because even amongst civilised and highly educated friends, we can see that it’s not working and are afraid of saying something vile or atrocious. And yet if the dinner table includes a successful professional say from an ethnic minority who is obviously integrated within the community, he is immediately accepted.
The issues here are not ones of racism but of fear and anger as entire communities disappear or are infested with crime perpetrated by immigrants. Again illegal immigration does not automatically mean increased crime. But the statistics are yelling out loud that that is what it means, as poor people without the skills to get good jobs in a European economy turn to crime. And before anyone retorts that training them would solve the problem, I suggest they do the maths and then translate that into the required higher taxes they will have to fork out.
As well as recognise that training a near illiterate illegal immigrant from Somalia who is in his mid twenties is near impossible no matter how well-intentioned you can be. Get real people. There are over 6,000 Africans in Malta, most of them single men without the skills to integrate into the economy and unable to build a meaningful life here, including the basics of finding a wife and having the possibility of a family. There is a crisis, and the sooner that it is recognised as such and dealt with firmly, the less risk there is of the far right gaining a foothold in Malta.
My personal fear is that the adopted black children of several Maltese friends will one day be the victims of racism in Malta. This is what will happen if such a tiny island in Malta does not effectively deal with illegal immigration. People are people, and sadly many of them are just unpleasant and unthinking – this will never change.
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