When Labour refused to impeach Judge Anton Depasquale

Set the Labour Party’s false, cheap and opportunistic crusade against the minister of home affairs in the context of its appalling refusal to impeach Judge Depasquale.

This was the leading article (editorial) in The Times on 28 September 2001.

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A SENSE OF BEWILDERMENT

Anybody who followed the case of Mr Justice Anton Depasquale will have been shocked by the outcome of last Tuesday`s apparently free vote in the House on the impeachment motion. That vote was transparently not as free as the country would have wished it to be.

The government voted in favour of the motion, the opposition against, with the brave exception of Dr Louis Buhagiar, who cast his vote with the government.

The facts of the case are simplicity itself. Mr Justice Depasquale absented himself from work. He claimed on his behalf that he had done so on a matter of conscience.

This conscientiousness lasted for the next seven years, faltering only recently when the judge realised that impeachment was round the corner.

The Commission for the Administration of Justice was unanimous in its opinion that the judge`s conduct was impeachable.

The motion for impeachment was placed before parliament in 1995, since when it gathered dust.

This year that dust was brushed away and the case came before parliament to judge.

Members on both sides of the House were allowed a free vote. What caused the failure of the opposition to look this case of justice in the eyes and vote in favour of the removal of a man who had not done a day`s work in seven years, burdening his colleagues in the process with the case-load he had abandoned? It could not have been a sense of what is right.

Dr Buhagiar apart, opposition MPs have much to answer for. Their leader will be answering on their behalf in the days to come. The electorate must sense that whatever he says cannot help asking two, simple questions.

The first is that if Mr Justice Depasquale can get away with a bout of conscience, even after he has lost case after case in the courts defending himself, why cannot all our judges be smitten the same way, stay at home, receive their pay packets, which are not insignificant, and spend the rest of their lives doing what this precedent has set?

The second question has equally profound implications. Given that nothing now prevents a judge from following in Mr Justice Depasquale`s footsteps, what signal was the opposition sending out, not only to the judiciary, not only to those in responsible positions but to the country at large?

It is definitely a wrong signal, and for this, most people are disappointed by the opposition`s attitude in this most important case.

Members of the opposition, with one brave exception, took their leader`s lead and dismissed the implications as if there were none. There is a grave one, at least. If a judge can refrain from carrying out his duties on the grounds that his conscience forbids him to do so, and still receive his monthly salary, which his conscience does not forbid him from accepting, each of 140,000 workers could conceivably make the same claim.

What we must remember, however, is that in this case, the occupation of the person involved is no ordinary one. It includes nothing less than the dispensation of justice, the power to imprison and to set free, to render to the evil-doer what is his due, to the wronged, his.

It is a terrible responsibility he carries. For seven years, Mr Justice Depasquale did not carry it.