When transparency is a game of pick and choose

Prime Minister Robert Abela’s justification for publicly announcing the name of government’s nominee for chief justice is that he wanted this to be an act of transparency. Abela claimed the Nationalist Party parliamentary group was not privy to the name he had proposed to Opposition leader Alex Borg in confidential talks and felt it necessary to inform them through a public declaration.

The prime minister added that his decision to publicly announce the nominee was nothing new since Bernard Grech had publicly announced the three nominees, he was pushing forward for the post of standards commissioner back in 2023.

Abela’s statements need to be unpacked to truly understand whether his motivations to publicly announce Judge Consuelo Scerri Herrera’s name are genuine or not.

For starters, the precedent Abela is quoting from 2023, involving the appointment of standards commissioner, cannot be compared in any way with the appointment of a chief justice.

Nominees for the role of standards commissioner are extraneous to the role. If no agreement is reached on their names, the individuals can go on with their ordinary lives. The lack of consensus on any of the names, also, will have no impact on the office of the ethics czar. This also holds true for nominees for the president. This does not mean that people being considered for any of these roles should be bandied about publicly at will by the politicians tasked to seek consensus, especially if the discussion about them takes the form of partisan mudslinging. There should be a structured process of how nominations are made and when the names should be made public.

But the case for chief justice is completely different. Nominees for chief justice have to be sitting judges—people who will continue to militate in court, presiding over cases and dealing with the new chief justice long after their names would have been cast aside. Publishing the names of nominees risks creating uncomfortable situations and exposing sitting judges to unnecessary ridicule in a highly charged political environment.

This does not mean that members of the judiciary should be beyond criticism. After all, they discharge a very important public function that has a direct impact on people’s lives. But putting them up for public slaughter for the sake of a political game where adversaries are more interested in tripping up each other is not right. It just makes a mockery of the people who are expected to deliver judgement every day.

It is this sentiment that makes us disagree with the prime minister over his decision to name government’s nominee, especially in a context where cross-party consensus is a must. This is more significant in a duopolistic environment where alternative majorities in parliament are impossible to achieve.

But the prime minister also makes the argument for increased transparency. It sounds noble if it were not hollow. We find it hard for the prime minister to justify his decision to publicly name the government’s nominee for chief justice on the basis of transparency when he has acted against transparency in other areas. It is ironic that the prime minister should speak of transparency only a few weeks after the standards commissioner lambasted his untransparent decision to stop the publication of asset declarations by his ministers.

It is ironic the prime minister should call for transparency when the MCAST payroll inquiry remains unpublished.

This selective deployment of the transparency argument does not convince us that the prime minister is being genuine when he says Scerri Herrera’s name was released for transparency’s sake. Really and truly it was an attempt to try and drive a wedge in the Opposition by drawing them into a shooting match. It didn’t quite work, which prompted the prime minister on Tuesday to table a motion with Scerri Herrera’s nomination in a bid to force a vote. Abela is simply setting up the judge for failure for no other reason than political opportunism.

Even if within the PN parliamentary group there is no consensus on Scerri Herrera’s nomination, the prime minister is being puerile to try and ride on this while putting the judge out to dry.

Discussions on such appointments should be held confidentially between the prime minister and the Opposition leader, with a modicum of respect towards each other and the suggested nominees. At the same time every side should approach the talks with an open mind and with justified arguments in favour or against suggested nominees. What we have seen so far is anything but respectful.