[WATCH] Ramona Attard: ‘There are legitimate questions one can ask about Vitals inquiry’

The Labour Party’s newest MP, Ramona Attard, dismisses the notion that her party has become more entrenched after the significant loss of votes seen in the 2024 European elections. 

Attard speaks to MaltaToday in her first interview since being co-opted at the beginning of the year. 

She fields questions on abortion, and despite her known pro-choice stance, she hesitates to state whether she wants wider access to pregnancy terminations in the PL’s next electoral manifesto. 

The former PL president is also asked about her comment that ending criminal libel was a mistake. She believes there should be a penalty that matches the serious harm false statements can cause to people's lives and reputations. Despite this, she repeats that she doesn’t want to see journalists being jailed. 

Attard defends the government’s attempt to alter citizens’ rights to request magisterial inquiries, as she calls for caution when faced with the notion that such inquiries prove vital when police don’t investigate certain cases. 

Like a growing cohort of her colleagues, she also questions a number of aspects in the Vitals inquiry. She seems unfazed when I point out that the Prime Minister and defence lawyers in the Vitals case seem to speak about the inquiry in very similar ways.

The following is an excerpt of the interview.

The full interview can also be viewed on Facebook and Spotify.

Do you believe that the PL’s next electoral programme should broaden a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy? 

The electoral programme is created through discussions in the party, the executive, and those who are tasked with writing it. It would be presumptuous of me to come here in the media and say what the programme should include. 

What I can say for certain is that I look forward to sharing my views about what the programme should include, some of which are accepted and others need more elaboration…

Let me take you back a few months to your last speech as PL president. You said that removing criminal libel was a mistake. Do you still hold that belief? 

(Nods) And I’ll explain as I wanted to explain that day. First of all, I don’t want journalists to end up in jail, I don’t agree with it.

But that’s what criminal libel means. 

Not in that sense; I’m against journalists going to jail and I was a journalist. I’m probably here today because I started off from journalism. But I think it’s very unfair that everyone shoots from the hip and the maximum penalties are around €11,000. We saw Carmelo Abela’s case who was awarded €7,000. 

Life and reputation are worth much more, so yes. I believe that there’s an imbalance between the damage that can be done by the pen and one’s remedies. I believe that the majority of journalists are responsible. The problem is that some people aren’t even journalists and they shoot from the hip. 

The punishments haven’t been updated in many years. It was a PN government who had raised the punishments, and I’m not saying that it was wrong. It was a time when news wouldn’t spread across the world in a second, so that’s where I think a discussion should be had. There are other journalists who share my belief like Mark Lawrence Zammit and Peppi Azzopardi who say that they were against government removing criminal libel because they believe that the pen can cut as much as a blade, not because they want to throw journalists in jail…

After the 2024 European election, the PL said it had a lesson to learn from the result. Before that election, we saw criticism against the judiciary and one magistrate in particular who finished an inquiry which revealed government wrongdoing. Now we’re seeing court experts and other inquiries being discredited. Is this the lesson that the PL learned?  

There’s always a lesson to be learned after each election. Even when we won elections with 40,000-vote majorities there was abstention. There didn’t seem to be a big shift toward the PN, but there were abstentions mid-legislature. When we were in the Opposition, government would always lose these elections, and this government reversed the trend. 

I don’t agree with the simplistic way you spoke about lessons… 

On the inquiries, those were done and people are now in court. People have the right to defend themselves and none of them are guilty yet. I say this as someone with a legal background. The defendants’ defence has the right to argue their points…

But we’ve heard these points coming from the Prime Minister. 

Inquiries are given a blank cheque. We see scrutiny of ministries’ funds from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, but this scrutiny itself isn't subject to the same level of oversight. So, all the resources the inquiry needed were given to it. 

If you see the Vitals inquiry, there are about 20 pages that show the conclusions, and the rest are the experts’ work. So, the inquiry is heavily based on the experts. You had a forensic accountant who wasn’t warranted to work in Malta, so you ask “was there no Maltese person with a warrant that could’ve done this job?”  

Another expert is refusing to come to Malta to be cross-examined. So, I think there are legitimate questions one can ask…

Scrutinising experts, keeping tabs of an inquiry’s cost, updating victims. These are all good changes and everyone can agree on that. But government’s reform limits one’s right to request a magisterial inquiry. The requirement to go to the police before requesting an inquiry defeats the whole purpose because we know of instances where the police failed to investigate certain cases. Isn’t it Machiavellian to bundle these good reforms with others that restrict the right to an inquiry? 

I disagree. This reform must be seen in the context of other reforms also mentioned in the electoral programme. This government introduced four inquiring magistrates. This government separated the prosecuting body (the Attorney General) from the investigating body (the police). 

So, in this country, the police are the entity with the resources necessary for investigation. That’s why the first port of call is the police.

But we know of instances where the police didn’t investigate. That’s where lack of trust comes from, that’s why it’s important to preserve the right to request an inquiry. 

There were only around 25 inquiries initiated in this manner, and about three quarters of them were requested by Dr [Jason] Azzopardi. So, we should be careful when we say “the police didn’t investigate.” Just because Repubblika says they don’t have faith in the police, statistics show the contrary…