Conviction for threatening Repubblika president time-barred, other charges confirmed

An appeals court has confirmed a €3,000 fine handed to a Valletta shop owner over a Facebook comment directed at the president of NGO Repubblika but overturned his conviction for threatening the activist, ruling it time-barred.

Last November, Joseph Camenzuli of Mosta, who owns a clothes shop near parliament, had been fined and ordered to submit to a protection order after a magistrate found him guilty of charges related to threats he had made under a Facebook post by Robert Aquilina.

Using a fake Facebook profile under the name “Mario Borg”, Camenzuli had written that “we are staying quiet until you make us angry…and you have already bothered me in Valletta and let me tell you, start being afraid when you’re alone in Valletta.”

Aquilina had told the Court of Magistrates that posts of this nature had led him to require police protection.

But Camenzuli had appealed the judgment, his lawyer David Gatt arguing that the charge of making threats was, in fact, time-barred.

The appellant, who told the court that he had been “genuinely insulted by what Aquilina had written about Labourites and their leadership” also argued that he “in no way imaginable” had insinuated that he would attack Aquilina, physically or otherwise, and that he was simply passing on a message.

The judge noted that the appellant also appeared to be contesting the first court’s evaluation of the facts and was arguing that the punishment imposed was excessive.

Deciding the case, Madame Justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera disagreed with the assertion that the man’s comments were open to interpretation.

“The appellant’s comment which he uploaded himself to Facebook appears to be clear and reflects the appellant’s anger. It is not an excuse that the appellant wrote it in the heat of the moment and this Court disagrees with the appellant’s claim…that by his last sentence he had meant that the people outside Parliament had started talking about him as if they were planning to do something to him.”

The judge upheld Camenzuli’s first argument, that the charge relating to threats was time barred, and so overturned the conviction in that regard, but dismissed the rest of his appeal, confirming the €3,000 fine.