How unseemly all this is

Judge Farrugia Sacco is suing The Times of Malta for publishing a story about him, “ticket touts” and the Malta Olympic Committee. A similar story was published prominently in The Times (London), which is where the Maltese media got the lead.

Yesterday, Farrugia Sacco said in court that he is not suing the London newspaper…yet. Obviously not, and I doubt that he ever will.

He can’t sue a London newspaper in the Maltese courts. He has to file his suit in Britain. This is a hugely costly affair, and if he loses, he will have to pay costs and expenses which can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, depending on how long the case takes.

True, if he wins the compensation is great, but the parameters used to judge libel and safeguard freedom of speech are not quite what they are in Malta. Judge Farrugia Sacco is unlikely to sue and win, especially given that The Sunday Times had a video and a transcript. He would have to balance the small odds of winning a large sum against the far greater odds of losing a large sum.

This does not happen in Malta, which is one of the reasons why people sue for libel left, right and centre, even if the grounds are spurious.

I have had a long-running case with the deputy leader of the Labour Party, for example, who sued me for referring to him as “a clown”. Yes, really. Hard to believe, but there you go.

This is the Labour Party that believes in freedom of expression, and what’s more, he’s legal counsel to Malta Today.

It is so cheap and easy to sue for libel in Malta, with no penalties or costs if you are not successful, that people adopt a ‘majtezwel’ approach to filing suits. They pay a small sum to register their suit, they pay a reasonable amount to their lawyer, and they chance their luck.

The person they sue, sometimes on terribly spurious grounds like with me, Toni Abela and the clown reference, is then hauled before the court and spends years disrupting one morning after another with court hearings. He or she is also landed with lawyers’ fees which still have to be paid even if he or she is cleared of libel.

There is no compensation for the harassment of years of court hearings, lost work on wasted mornings, and legal expenses incurred. The person who sues another for libel when there are no grounds and when there is no libel found is not made to pay the costs or any compensation. Hence the vast number of absolutely frivolous suits, jamming up the courts and being used as a form of harassment against journalists.

When it costs just a couple of hundred euros, if that, to register a libel suit, harassing journalists comes cheap and there is no penalty to be paid for doing. Rather, there might be a reward. So politicians, especially when they are lawyers and spend most of the day in court anyway, just go for it because they might as well.

In any case, it’s absolutely disgraceful for a judge to be standing before his peers suing for libel. The only member of the judiciary who I can recall doing that is, coincidentally, one of Judge Farrugia Sacco’s closest friends, Magistrate Herrera, who didn’t even sue herself but went to the extreme of using the police.