Magistrate refuses Yorgen Fenech request for unmonitored telephone in prison

A magistrate has thrown out a request by Yorgen Fenech’s defence team that he be afforded an unmonitored telephone facility in prison.

In an application filed on 23 November, lawyers for the alleged mastermind behind the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, who has been held in pre-trial custody for just under a year, had asked that he be provided with a phone connection to his lawyers that was not monitored by the prison authorities.

But in a stinging decree, Magistrate Rachel Montebello said the court was not going to tell the prison director what he should or shouldn’t do in the prisons, unless it impinges on the criminal justice process before it. 

“He [the prison director] is not a party to the proceedings. In any case, he is appointed in his position precisely to administer the functions imposed upon him by law, amongst them the management of the facility and the implementation of the legal provisions regulating it,” the magistrate said.

The court rebutted the assertion that the accused’s rights would be infringed.

She said that the prison director had already replied to lawyer Charles Mercieca’s application, declaring that he had offered the lawyers the faculty of keeping electronic equipment inside prison to be used during the consultations between the lawyers and their client.

But on the request for an unmonitored line of communication between the accused and his lawyers, the court pointed to subsidiary legislation regulating the prison which said that every telephone inside the prison must be equipped with monitoring and recording technology.

Although it was true, as had been argued by Mercieca, that all the laws of the country should apply to ensure the safeguarding of the accused’s rights, said the court, “in the same way the laws of the country must be observed and this court is certainly not going to put aside a law or regulation or order the director to do so.”

This is the third decree in 24 hours delivered by the courts on various applications filed by Fenech.

The other two rulings, including one by the constitutional court, concerned separate matters linked to the compilation of evidence against Fenech.