Charles ‘Pips’ Muscat claims breach of fair trial in trafficking case

A convicted murderer awaiting trial for drug trafficking, has claimed that his right to a fair trial was breached by the lack of legal assistance during the early stages of proceedings against him.

Earlier this week, Charles Muscat, known as ‘il-Pips’, challenged the proceedings against him on Constitutional grounds.

Muscat had, along with 18 others, been charged with conspiring to traffic drugs. At the end of the compilation of evidence against him, his case was scheduled for trial.

Muscat gained notoriety during the 1990s, eventually being sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 1999 for a cocaine-fuelled double homicide. After a five-day cocaine binge at his Mosta home in September 1994, Muscat shot dead drug dealer Leli Sultana, ‘it-Tazz’, thinking he had been sent to kill him. As he left the house, he threatened a group of bystanders warning them not to report him and ended up shooting one of them, Alfred Grima.

He was subsequently granted early release in 2011 for good behaviour.

In the drug trafficking proceedings, the Attorney General had decided that 11 of the 19 accused were only to face a magistrate – and therefore a much lighter possible sentence – while the other eight, Muscat among them, were put down for a trial by jury.

On 5 February 2014, Muscat filed a Constitutional application, claiming his right to a fair trial in the drug trafficking case had been breached, but this application was dismissed as his trial had not yet started.

The latest application, filed by lawyers Franco Debono, Amadeus Cachia and Veronique Dalli, attacks the upcoming trial from a different angle, arguing that he had not been assisted by a lawyer during his interrogation. This and the absence of a fitting remedy for this absence in local law, breached his fundamental human rights.

The application refers to and quotes at length from judgements including the damning judgment against Malta by the European Court of Human Rights in Mario Borg vs Malta, which had found a violation of fundamental human rights where an accused person had been convicted on the strength of a statement he released during interrogation, while not being assisted by a lawyer.

The European Court itself had expressed the opinion that in similar circumstances, “it is only through a retrial that a breach of fundamental human rights can be remedied,” the application reads.

“Despite the judgement by the European Courts... to this day he has not been afforded an effective remedy by the national courts and no procedure that he can use to obtain a remedy exists in Maltese law.”