The source of the matter

This very lacuna was made evident last week, when the police tuned up at MaltaToday's offices to arrest the acting editor of the Sunday edition over a detail in an article that had appeared three weeks earlier.

In many countries this sort of initiative would set alarm bells ringing. The arrest of a journalist and editor is never a decision taken lightly: the free press being considered one of the pillars of the democratic state (and the police being another).

Still, as in every other sphere of public life, there are no doubt cases where such action may indeed be warranted The free press is after all not above the law; and this arrest alone - like other incidents before it - makes that abundantly clear.

But the underlying issue here is not the arrest in itself: it is the undefined purposes this arrest seems to have served.

The MaltaToday article, published on 9 June, that precipitated this action by the police was about a court order to confiscate property belonging to a Russian tycoon resident in Malta. Rakhat Aliyev is wanted overseas on charges of torture and crimes against humanity committed when he was deputy chief of Kazakhstan's secret service in 2000. The ongoing case has been the subject of numerous articles in MaltaToday, but on this occasion, we overlooked a law (Article 4 of the Money Laundering Act) against divulging details of a garnishee order.

Ignorance of the law is clearly not a defence, though it remains a fact that the oversight was completely unintended. Nonetheless the police are within their remit to resort to an arrest if they feel it is necessary. However it quickly became apparent that they were not acting on the basis of that offence at all.

Matthew Vella may have been arrested on charges of breaching a specific law against reporting garnishee orders, but the questions he was asked during the interrogation were aimed only at eliciting the source of the information contained in that story (and all the others about Aliyev).

This clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with the offence for which he was arrested. One must therefore ask why the police were so interested in confidential information regarding this particular case - interested enough to even effect an arrest on unrelated charges, in order to ask about something for which no arrest was ever made.

This is a matter of grave concern, as it implies that the police may be pursuing a private, not public, agenda. It also constitutes a direct attempt to violate a recognised human right.

The European Court of Human Rights defines protection of a journalist's source as "one of the basic conditions for press freedom," which the state is in turn duty bound to uphold.

Without such protection, the EHCR noted in Goodwin vs UK, "sources may be deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of public interest. As a result the vital public-watchdog role of the press may be undermined, and the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information be adversely affected."

Even local legislation acknowledges this fact - although significantly, the law itself binds only the courts and not the police. Nonetheless, in 1996, the Press Act was amended to prohibit courts from holding journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal a source.

And yet this newspaper is no stranger to attempts to wrest information about our sources. Past attempts to do precisely that came from the Offices of the President and the Prime Minister, so it is hardly surprising that the police, too, would consider it part of their job description to disregard local and international law.

It is however more worrying, as on this occasion the police's behaviour was tantamount to an abuse of executive powers such as the right of arrest, with implications that go far beyond the circumstances of this particular case.

In their own defence, the police may well point towards the fact that both the Human Rights Charter and the Press Act also contain provisos enabling them to override such rights, citing the "public interest." Yet this selfsame exception clause - so often abused all over the world in order to justify human rights violations - only makes their behaviour all the more questionable.

Is it in the public interest for the police to probe the media for their sources on sensitive stories - in this case, involving serious international human rights violations - and in the process break the same law they exist to enforce? And whose interest does it really serve for the police (and possibly other authorities also) to perceive human rights and democratic conventions as obstacles which can be overcome simply by waving a vague trump card called "the public interest"?

Returning to the case at hand, there can be no doubt that the public interest proviso does not even remotely apply here. What remains is a very evident misapplication of executive powers by the police, for which a thorough explanation is expected.