Sweet and sour justice

Hate to say it, but I am beginning to suspect that an inherent sense of injustice - possibly coupled with misogyny, xenophobia and even an imperceptible streak of sadism - may now be a mandatory qualification to practice law in this country.

How else can one explain the fact that 'justice', as meted out by our law courts, so often blatantly violates the very principle that the same law courts supposedly exist to uphold? A principle that is inscribed onto the wall in every single courtroom in nearby Italy: 'La legge è uguale per tutti'?

For those who were not brought up watching Goldrake and Lupin III on TV (ok, yes, and Edwige Fenech, too) that's Italian for: "the law applies equally to everyone".

Yet we all know that's not how it really works in practice; that there is something missing from that statement; something that sounds like it should also include the words "BUT", "SOME" and "ANIMALS", in roughly that order.

One example that sticks out like a prawn cracker was the recent crackdown on Chinese massage parlours which doubled up as brothels. OK I admit this minor event has since been eclipsed and overshadowed by all sorts of unlikely development - including a few of truly papal proportions - but there was something so cynical, so blatantly hypocritical about the sudden partial interest taken by our law enforcement officers in only one tiny niche within the local prostitution market... that even if this observation comes rather late in the day, I still feel that someone, somewhere, had to at least point it out.

Meanwhile, I freely admit that we in the media (myself included) had lots of fun with the names involved in that particular arraignment - speculating whether Lin Han gave 'Han-jobs', or asking ourselves what might have happened to that other suspect named 'Yung Ho' (who must have somehow escaped arrest on this occasion).

But let's face it: if we all had such fun with their names... it was because we were given names, and even photographs, to have fun with. The same could not be said for the Maltese businessman charged with the much more serious offence of 'living off the earnings' of those women. All we were told is that this man comes from Tarxien - which I can't help but feel is terribly unfair on the rest of the population of that village: especially businessmen who happen to fall into the same overall age bracket, and who now have to convince their wives that the man caught red-handed running a brothel was actually someone else.

But the real victims are of course the women that this man stands accused of exploiting. Not only did the presiding magistrate fail to provide them with the same level of protection that was afforded to their pimp... and by the way this also raises the question of why the courts even felt this man deserved protection in the first place: they rarely feel the same way about people charged with less serious crimes such as drug possession... but their bail was set at almost four times the amount, too: €22,000 for the prostitutes, as opposed to only €6,000 for the pimp.

I am sorry but this is simply outrageous. It's the equivalent of sentencing a getaway driver to life imprisonment, while allowing the armed bank-robbers who masterminded the entire heist to get off practically scot-free.

At which point the question becomes inevitable. Why are the law-courts bending over backwards to protect a man charged with serious criminal behaviour, while throwing the book at a handful of women whose 'crime' is so comparatively petty?

I asked this question to acquaintances who are more familiar with legal matters than most, and I have to admit I was quite disturbed by their replies.

The first answer I got gave credit to the businessman's lawyers - arguing that unlike the lawyers representing the Chinese women, these actually took the trouble to request a court order and frame their request in such a way as to make it difficult to turn down.

OK, I did not follow the case in court, so I am unaware if the other lawyers (i.e., representing the suspected prostitutes) made a similar request. Nor do I know if these lawyers were provided for free through Malta's legal aid system.

Either way, to me it is deeply unsettling that a matter of such basic justice should boil down to one's choice of lawyer. And while I know this sounds terribly naïve... well, sorry but I'm not one of those who just accepts the 'oh, but that's the way of the world' sort of response... and here are but two of my many reasons.

One, because it is simply a lousy excuse which disregards the most basic logical requirements to qualify as an 'argument'. That the world is an unfair place is something I think we can all safely agree upon. But how on earth does it follow that we should therefore just accept unfairness without batting an eyelid?

If that were the case, well, we may as well throw away the country's entire legal system lock stock and barrel, and just slip back into the old 'nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw' paradigm (from which, paradoxically, we had originally invented such things as 'laws' to escape).

The second reason is that this approach simply lets the judicial authorities off the hook altogether, despite the fact that these people have both a legal and moral obligation to at least attempt to ensure the smooth running of our country's justice machine.

My reasoning (for what it's worth) is different. I think a seasoned magistrate worth his or her salt should have pre-emptively recognized the existence of a discrepancy here. I think he or she [note: it was actually a she, but let's not tie this down to any one magistrate - we have seen similar discrepancies from adjudicators of both sexes and all ages] should have understood that these two cases cannot exactly be taken in isolation from one another - for all the world as though there were no connection at all between the otherwise separate criminal cases of a pimp and his own prostitutes; and that for the same reason, a comparison between the two cases would become inevitable.

And yet this doesn't appear to have been the case at all. It seems that the Maltese justice system just doesn't see any problem with a scenario whereby the more serious (and possibly even dangerous) of two suspected criminal suspects gets off far more lightly than others who could just as easily be described as that same person's victims.

And this in turn raises a tiny, weenie question. Let me try and put it this way: if you can see there is a problem, and I can see there is a problem... and yet the people we both entrust to administer justice in our country just can't seem to identify this problem at all... well, I think that alone should qualify a major (but MAJOR) cause for concern.

Am I the only one who sees things this way? Possibly... but I somehow doubt it.