Political persons ‘subject to wider limits of acceptable criticism’

A court has ruled that a blog post, describing Labour party officials as “clowns, idiots and incompetents” fell within the parameters of fair comment and value judgment and was therefore not defamatory.

Columnist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia had uploaded an article in August 2008 in which she had described the election of Joseph Muscat as giving “another earthquake warning in his usual column in Times of Malta. He’s unhappy with the party system that elects clowns, idiots and incompetents to key roles - except where he is concerned, of course. The people who elected Toni Abela, Anglu Farrugia and Jason Micallef also elected him, but he obviously fails to see the connection and that he is part of the joke. In his own way, he is as crassly incompetent as the rest of them.”

Caruana Galizia was subsequently sued for libel by Labour’s deputy leader Toni Abela.

However, in a judgment delivered today, magistrate Francesco Depasquale ruled that the article was not an attack on Abela alone, but had criticised the party leadership as a whole. This did not constitute libel, said the magistrate, as it was a value judgment by Caruana Galizia, as opposed to a statement of facts.

Magistrate Depasquale also criticised Abela for unnecessarily protracting the proceedings, which took seven years to be decided.

Abela, as a political person, was subject to wider limits of acceptable criticism, said the magistrate.