Why. Are. We. Waiting?
“Access to a lawyer while in detention is generally considered the very minimum of detainees’ rights, so much so that it is taken for granted in the rest of Europe. Malta is probably the only European country where this right has not been properly translated into law….Simply put, the fewer guarantees there are, the more convenient it is for the government of the day. Malta should really pull its socks up and introduce these guarantees once and for all. After all, you never know who’s going to need them in future…I don’t see why it should take so long to effect these reforms. This issue was on the agenda long before 1987. The PN had rightly insisted on this while in Opposition, and as far as I recall it featured in one of its electoral programmes….either 1981 or 1987. Besides, it’s not as though we’d be starting a revolution, or anything like that. It would merely be a case of accepting what is already standard practice in all civilised countries.”
– Giovanni Bonello, a judge in the European Court of Human Rights, interviewed in Malta Today, today.
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That there seems to be little public pressure on our legislators to make this part of the laws of Malta is, in my view, a poor reflection of our awareness of civil rights in this country.
Isn’t it worrying that the present Commissioner of Police declared during this week’s Xarabank that he was against the adoption of this right in Malta? His justification was that this would significantly lower the rate of crime case closures!
Surely, I would sooner see two guilty persons go free rather than even one single innocent person wrongly convicted!
Marku is spot on. The most surprising thing about all this is that there is such little public pressure for such the institution of such rights.
And what about road blocks manned by the Military. Here in Malta we seem to take accept them as normal. A South American friend of mine once commented that such scenes remind him of his own country when it was ruled by a military Junta.
Why are we waiting?
God knows.
I thought I had heard wrong when the Commissioner of Police came up with his excuse, on Xarabank last Friday, for keeping the status quo on the matter.
“Moggy Sunday, 2 November 2108hrs – you wrote:
Why are we waiting? God knows. I thought I had heard wrong when the Commissioner of Police came up with his excuse, on Xarabank last Friday, for keeping the status quo on the matter.”
Sometimes I truly believe that in some instances, the more we think we change, the more we remain the same.
[Sybil – Sometimes I truly believe that in some instances, the more we think we change, the more we remain the same.]
True. And who would have thought that a Police Commissioner would ever have sat there, saying that he feels that the police force he is running would be less successful in making convictions if suspects are given what is theirs by right almost everywhere else in the civilised world? Is our police force suffering from some kind of institutional inferiority complex?