Mintoff and the European Court of Human Rights

We Maltese were allowed to take our human rights complaints to the European Court of Human Rights only AFTER the 1987 election.

During the whole of the Mintoff-KMB regime – 16 horrid years that broke the island’s back and sapped its people’s spirit – we were not allowed by them to petition the Strasbourg Court.

Malta was the ONLY state in ‘free’ Europe (as distinct from the huge chunk of Europe that was behind the Iron Curtain) which denied its citizens this right.

It was only on election day, 1987, that Dr Joseph Brincat, a minister in KMB’s caretaker government, signed the protocol allowing individuals to sue Malta in future for human rights abuses.

This ensured that the government of which he formed part, and its two lousy predecessors, would get away with everything. And they did.

Permission for Maltese citizens to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights was not something that the Labour government of 1987 granted us as a parting gift after suddenly realising that it had been wrong and abusive for 16 years.

No. It was a parting shot which those on the way out sought to inflict on those who replaced them. That’s the way they saw it: a burdensome curse for a government rather than a right for the people.

When Mintoff took his human rights complaints to the Strasbourg Court, he exercised a right he had persistently denied every Maltese citizen when he and his gang of thieves were in power.

Human rights were there to serve him, not to serve the people he purported to love so much.