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Matthew Vella
The Ministry of Justice and Home Affairs is proposing that imprisonment for the crime of libel be abolished in upcoming legal and judicial reforms featured in its White Paper ‘Towards a Better and More Expeditious Administration of Justice’.
The White Paper acknowledges the severity of the punishment of imprisonment for those found guilty of criminal libel and proposes that imprisonment be removed from the Press Act.
“When originally this particular chapter came into force the political and legal climate in our country was very distant from the democratic climate that prevails nowadays,” the White Paper reads about the coming into force of the Press Act in 1974. The Minister of Justice was then Anton Buttigieg, himself a former editor at the helm of the MLP’s paper Voice of Malta back in 1959.
Defamatory libel, one of the most sought after suits by injured parties, carries the maximum punishment of three months’ imprisonment and a fine. The maximum punishment is two years’ imprisonment for the publication of matter with the intent to extort money.
The White Paper acknowledges that the reasons behind the provision of the punishment of imprisonment today “do not necessarily exist”.
“Today, a journalist, even if he or she has erred, can and should be subject to a pecuniary penalty and an action for damages. That is when he or she is only guilty of the crime of libel.”
However, an exemption is made in the case of the Official Secrets Act and the provisions relating to sedition, which will still carry the punishment of imprisonment.
Press charges
The first journalist to suffer the brunt of the Press Act with a full three months’ imprisonment and a Lm50 fine was Joseph Calleja, editor of Nationalist satirical newspaper In-Niggieza, back in 1974.
Calleja was found guilty of having defamed Labour Minister for labour, employment and welfare Guze Cassar and exposing him to public ridicule in the 1973 article ‘Pudina bis-Sultana à la Cassar’ (Pudding with Sultana à la Cassar).
In the article, Calleja recounted how the minister had asked his permanent secretary to transfer a pregnant employee at the Gozo Welfare Department to Malta to avoid shame back in Gozo. Cassar sued Calleja for libel feeling that the article conveyed the implicit message that the employee had been impregnated by the minister himself.
Adding a list of particular ingredients for the ‘pudding’ – eggs, sausage, sultanas, ‘lots of movement’ – Calleja was found to have written “through thinly-veiled words, an indubitable pornographic description of the sexual act with consequences of pregnancy”.
The sentence was reduced to two and a half months by Judge Maurice Caruana Curran.
Former Labour MP Joe Micallef Stafrace was also imprisoned for four days after being found guilty of vilifying British Governor Sir Robert Laycock in his role as the editor of the General Workers Union’s daily Is-Sebh back in 1959.
Micallef Stafrace was jailed for publishing a caricature of Laycock being carried shoulder high, drinking gin with a band in the background, with the sarcastic caption of: ‘Kemm ghandu qalbu tajba’ (How kind-hearted he is), after a ban on band marches had been lifted.
Laycock had at the time prohibited band marches for fear of trouble. Following the intervention of Reverend Prof Serafin Zarb, who was very close to Mabel Strickland and the British authorities, the ban was lifted for the feast of St Dominic.
matthew@newsworksltd.com
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