Judge condemns police treatment of lone Castille protestor

A judge has lambasted the demeaning treatment suffered by a man who had been arrested while staging a one-man peaceful protest against the authority then known as MEPA outside Castille in 2014, and sent to a mental hospital.

Ignatius Busuttil had been arrested, interrogated and sent to Mount Carmel after he stuck a poster stating that MEPA did not treat everyone the same to his car and parked it on the roundabout in front of Castille on three occasions in August 2014.

The cause of his disaffection was thought to be enforcement notice which the Planning Authority had issued against him in 2009 over the change of use of a private garage to a car wash that was not covered by a permit.

News reports suggest that the man had suffered from stress and had trouble sleeping prior to the incident. The Police had said that Busuttil had, on a number of consecutive days, “dangerously parked his vehicle across the roundabout near Castille and refused to obey Police orders when ordered to remove the vehicle”. 

Busuttil had told journalists that when he was taken to the Floriana Health Centre after his arrest, he had been given an appointment for a psychiatric consultation at Mater Dei Hospital the following morning. In spite of this, the police had escorted him straight to Mater Dei Hospital where he was seen by another doctor, who committed him to Mount Carmel hospital for three days.

After finally being examined by a third doctor, Busuttil was discharged the next day.

In a judgement handed down earlier today in the First Hall of the Civil Court in its Constitutional jurisdiction, a clearly outraged Mr. Justice Joseph Zammit McKeon, was scathing in his criticism of how the incident had been handled by the police, accusing the force of “seeking every pretext to block the applicant from carrying out his protest.” “It is clear that the police wanted to find an excuse to stop him from expressing his grievance at all costs,” the sentence reads. “They then went to a second doctor in order to commit him to Mount Carmel, after the first doctor to examine him clearly did not see this as being necessary.”

Busuttil had officially been accused of obstructing traffic – he had parked his car illegally on the roundabout outside the Prime Minister's offices, although his car was small enough to allow traffic to continued to flow unabated.

“From a dispute over bad parking, an utterly pointless referral to Mount Carmel Hospital was made, at the expense of the State.”

In doing so, the police had gone beyond what was necessary and had prejudiced the dignity of the applicant, the court said. “The right to protest is an integral part of the right of freedom of expression - and so it should continue to be protected - not simply in principle but because the interests of national democracy demand it.”

In order to justify a denial of the right to freedom of expression, the court observed, the requirement of providing “determining and conclusive evidence of manifest danger towards public order and security, that could not otherwise be avoided” had been well established in both legal doctrine and jurisprudence.

In the absence of such evidence, there is a violation of the law, said the judge, “and the pretext of public order should not be used to excuse his behaviour.”

Judge McKeon ruled that the Court was in no doubt that Busuttil had not posed a danger to public order “in any shape or form.”

“This court hasn't the slightest doubt that the way the police reacted to the behaviour of the applicant had exceeded every acceptable limit in a democratic society where fundamental human rights are not only respected but should find the protection they merit in their application. They [fundamental human rights] should never be faced with walls, irrespective of the nature of these walls!”

As compensation for the humiliation that Busuttil had been forced to endure in being committed to a psychiatric hospital unnecessarily, the court awarded him the sum of €2,000.