Criminal defamation laws used against journalists have no place in a civilised society

Labour politicians and their cronies use criminal defamation routinely. That is to be expected: they do not understand the fundamental meaning of democracy.

So they need to be told. This is one matter the Opposition should take up vociferously, pointing out the hypocrisy of a government that styles itself as liberal and progressive while rushing off to the police and demanding that journalists be prosecuted for criticising or mocking them. They shouldn’t even do it if a journalist has lied about them, because there are civil remedies, starting from what is known under the law as ‘the right to reply’ even before resorting to the Courts of Justice.

When I began working in journalism, for The Sunday Times and for The Malta Independent, the use of the very civilised ‘right to reply’ was standard practice, and it was routinely honoured. Somebody wrote something about you that was wrong, and you fired off a response which the editor was (and still is, under the law) obliged to carry in a similarly prominent position. And the matter ended there. No court, no police, no civil action, no waste of public and personal time and money over several years.

But since then, people are just rushing straight to court, skipping the ‘right to reply’ completely. And cabinet ministers and other politicians who should know better, go to the police and demand the prosecution of journalists.

Matters are deteriorating fast.

And the irony should not escape you of a woman – now living high on the hog on public money, with a full-time salary at Projects Malta and 900 euros a month to advise Twanny L-Bronka – whose father escaped prosecution for the murder of Raymond Caruana because the chief witness, who turned state’s evidence, was conveniently found dead down a shaft by the police after surviving a car-bomb attack which crippled him, going to the police to demand that I am prosecuted for pointing out the sickening hypocrisy of her behaviour.