[ANALYSIS] Law and… disorder? Carm Mifsud Bonnici profiled

Corradino prison blues | Police | Immigration | Law courts | Morality

Nobody in his right mind would ever describe the twin portfolios of justice and home affairs minister – held by Carm Mifsud Bonnici until last January – as the easiest job in the world.

Former European Court Judge Giovanni Bonello once described it as the very opposite: “Whenever I meet a newly appointed government minister, I always say ‘congratulations’. But in the case of justice ministers, I say ‘lungi giorni’ (my condolences) instead...”

Part of the reason is that justice ministers have the unenviable (some might say impossible) task of bringing to heel an unmanageable monster called the Law Courts… while also being responsible for the office of the Attorney General (and therefore, indirectly, the counsel for the prosecution).

And until the ministry was finally split into two, the same person was also politically responsible for such notorious administrative minefields as the Police Force and the so-called ‘Corradino Correctional Facilities’… not to mention the most thankless task of the lot: Malta’s highly contentious immigration policy, which has been regularly torn to shreds by human rights activists and anti-immigration hardliners alike.

Until last week, the man in charge of all such ‘home affairs’ was Carm Mifsud Bonnici: the latest in a veritable dynasty that has peppered many of the country’s most strategic power-nodes with Mifsud Bonnicis of various shapes and sizes: from President Ugo, to Prime Minister Karmenu, to Chief Justice Giuseppe, all the way back to Carmelo ‘Il-Gross’ in the 1930s.

But the past six months have not been kind to the youngest Mifsud Bonnici to try his hand at politics. Not only did he lose half his portfolio to Chris Said last January; but he went on to spectacularly lose the rest of his ministry after a protracted and acrimonious showdown with one of his own parliamentary colleagues.

Popular reactions have to date been nothing if not sympathetic: people have since praised Carm Mifsud Bonnici for his honesty, his integrity, his sound morals, and above all his loyalty and dedication to the Nationalist Party. But public praise for his actual achievements, as both justice and home affairs minister, have been rather thin on the ground...raising the question of whether today's outspoken support for Carm is indeed motivated by admiration for his work as minister.

Corradino prison blues

Before trying on the justice and home affairs minister outfit for himself, Mifsud Bonnici had been parliamentary secretary within the same ministry since 2003: time enough, one would think, to first familiarise himself with the many, various and highly toxic problems that infest the Corradino Correctional Facility, before going on to unveil his own plan for prison reform.

Initially he did offer a glimpse of hope that things would change under his tenure. Upon replacing Tonio Borg in 2008, he lost little time in announcing a White Paper on Restorative Justice: a long overdue administrative reform that would introduce such basic concepts as parole to the local prison system. But it soon became apparent that the hallmark of Mifsud Bonnici's entire approach to home affairs would be 'continuity' rather than 'change'.

Having unleashed a promising White Paper in 2008, Mifsud Bonnici would prove somewhat less hurried to implement the legislation. It was only when under pressure from Franco Debono that parole was in fact introduced last December - and even then, the reform was hurriedly introduced in piecemeal fashion, and to date not all the necessary structures envisaged by the same law are yet in place.

Inmates soon found themselves indiscriminately encouraged to apply for parole, despite the fact that the law itself required that only those who had already served a proportion of their sentence were actually eligible. Worse still, administrative bodies such as the Parole Board and Offender Assessment Board - whose job is to evaluate applications - had not yet been set up, at a time when inmates were falling over themselves to submit their applications.

Today - six months after the reform was implemented - some inmates are still awaiting an acknowledgement of receipt of their own applications for parole.

But before even tackling such administrative cock-ups - not to mention much more serious issues, such as an endemic drug trafficking problem within prison - there are certain basic systemic failures that cannot be ignored.

Corradino remains the only prison in Europe to be administered directly by the police... who unaccountably also double up as the Malta's only prosecution office... and this did not change one iota under Mifsud Bonnici.

Effectively, all aspects of the criminal justice system - from police investigation, to arrest and interrogation, to prosecution, to the courts and finally prison itself - were until last January the sole preserve of one man, and one man only.

Apart from the inherent injustice of this unique prison system, the set-up also contributes to the general perception that home affairs is a mammoth ministry that is simply too large and unwieldy for all but a 'Super Minister' to handle.

Within a short time it became inescapable that Mifsud Bonnici was not, in fact, on top of the situation at all. Long before the Josette Bickle case reared its ugly head, the rampant availability of drugs in Kordin had been repeatedly highlighted by prisoners' rights organisation Mid-Dlam Ghad Dawl (MDD) and by Dr George Grech, clinical director of government's anti-drug agency Sedqa, among others.

When the Bickle case amply confirmed the existence of a drug trafficking network within Kordin, Mifsud Bonnici's response was to remind the public that the case pre-dated his own appointment to minister. Apart from creating the impression that he was merely passing the buck to his predecessor Tonio Borg, Mifsud Bonnici overlooked the fact that he was parliamentary secretary at the time; and more significantly, that fresh cases of drugs in prison were being registered even as he made the above remark.

Moreover, the prison system remains to date hopelessly ill-equipped to handle a growing category of female juvenile offenders. The Young Offenders Unit Rehabilitation Services remains an exclusively male-only facility, and it transpired recently that, for lack of designated accommodation, young female offenders have to be housed together with adults, against all known norms of good practice and common sense. (The only alternative is the equally unacceptable practice of housing them in Mount Carmel Psychiatric Hospital instead.)

On top of all this, individual prison conditions remain woefully substandard, especially in the maximum security Division 6 - as highlighted by successive reports by the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Degrading Treatment.

Police

If Mifsud Bonnici failed to make any significant impact on the systemic problems at Corradino, his approach to the Police Force was more a case of actively postponing and resisting necessary reforms for as long as possible.

The clearest example has to be his obstinate refusal to enact legislation, originally passed in distant 2002, to allow arrested persons the right of access to legal assistance in police custody.

The legal notices were eventually published in 2010 - eight years after the legislation was approved by Parliament - and had hitherto been furiously resisted by Police Commissioner John Rizzo: who even said on live TV that 'access to legal assistance would make it harder for the police to solve crimes'.

In the end it took a series of judgments by the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the threat of a situation whereby past convictions could be overturned, to literally force he minister's hand and reluctantly introduce a basic right that is widely taken for granted throughout the civilized world.

Nor is this the only hiccup to have characterised Mifsud Bonnici's handling of the police portfolio. Under his watch, the Police Force found itself accused of gross human rights violations - including one accusation of murder sparked by the mysterious death of Nicholas Azzopardi while in police custody in April 2008.

Initial inquiries exonerated the police of Azzopardi's own deathbed claims of having been brutally beaten by the police, and then thrown off the bastions and left for dead. But doubts have since emerged about the testimony of one of the police officers involved in the interrogation... renewing calls for fresh inquiries.

Even if one were to accept prima facie the original inquiry's conclusions, the case nonetheless reveals deeply worrying internal procedural problems in the interrogation regime at the Floriana depot. It transpired that Azzopardi had been allowed to wander off unattended in the police compound - against all known safety procedures. The outcome of the inquiry also confirmed what many had long suspected - that the police simply do not shoulder responsibility for 'accidents' that befall people while in their custody, even if the accident was caused by police negligence (in fact, to date no responsibility of any has ever been shouldered for Azzopardi's death).  

Today, four years later, there has been no revision to the general policies regarding police custody and interrogation procedures. Mifsud Bonnici has so far resisted pressure to overhaul the police's so-called 'internal inquiries' department, which remains a two-man operation ensconced within the HQ of the same Police Force it is supposed to investigate.

Nor was there any attempt to review official police procedure regarding the use of firearms, following the death in 2007 of Bastjan Borg: shot five times in the head, shoulder and chest, while threatening police officers with a pen-knife.

Once again, inquiries absolved the police of wrong-doing, in spite of the fact that non-lethal weapons had been available at the time... and also that Borg's family had written to the Commissioner to warn about his mental condition.

But the real issue concerns the lack of any serious policies governing such issues, which distinguishes our police force from those of most other European countries. (In the UK, for instance, policemen are issued with a 200-page manual on firearm use upon joining the force).

Immigration

Irregular immigration remains arguably the most sensitive area of the home affairs portfolio from a popular perception point of view; and as such - unlike either the police or prison - 'doing nothing' was never really going to be an option.

And as newly appointed minister in 2008, Carm Mifsud Bonnici quickly had an opportunity to 'do something' that his predecessor, Tonio Borg, had unsuccessfully tried to do for years.

In January 2009, the EU's council of ministers met to finalise the European immigration and asylum pact, opening up a window of opportunity to secure a 'burden-sharing' agreement with our European neighbours. An ecstatic Mifsud Bonnici returned from those meetings to triumphantly announce that he had in fact secured a clause on "mutual responsibility and solidarity" in the final document.

His triumph would however be short-lived. Under scrutiny, it turned out that it was only a vague and non-binding agreement for resettlement of refugees in other EU States... in fact it has enjoyed only very limited application ever since.

Mifsud Bonnici's efforts to counter increasing public scepticism likewise proved ineffectual. In January 2009, EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malstrom hammered the last nail in the coffin of European subsidiarity, by starkly admitting that Europe's response to Malta's plea for help had been a "failure".

More recently still, NGOs involved in asylum issues criticised Mifsud Bonnici for insisting on European help, without doing his own bit to improve the conditions of detention. 

Like Borg before him, Mifsud Bonnici soon found himself consistently falling between two stools: criticised by anti-immigration hard-liners for 'failing to protect the national interest'; and rebuked by humanitarian NGOs and the Council of Europe for Malta's questionable human rights record.

A visibly exasperated Mifsud Bonnici sometimes responded with fierce and fiery criticism of his own. In 2010, he pulled Malta out of all Frontex missions, after the EU's border patrol agency failed to incorporate any of his recommendations in its revised code of engagement. He has elsewhere crossed swords with both the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture - accusing the former of "playing Russian roulette with migrants' lives", and lambasting the latter's repeated complaints about Malta's detention centres.

The most recent spat over immigration occurred just weeks before his resignation: this time the International Council of Jurists slammed the Home Affairs Ministry for refusing to acknowledge that the immigration phenomenon is a permanent facet of daily life... rather than a 'temporary' condition that can be dealt with through 'temporary' measures.

"During our visit, we found cases of detention and reception conditions, which may have amounted to degrading treatment against the standard imposed by the European Convention on Human Rights," was the stark conclusion of the ICJ's report: to which Mifsud Bonnici's characteristic reply was to reject the findings as 'warped and unrealistic'.

Human rights concerns would continue to undermine Mifsud Bonnici's tenure on another level also. In 2010, Italy would adopt a controversial "push-back" policy, whereby asylum seekers were indiscriminately returned to Libya without being either screened or given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Mifsud Bonnici supported this contentious policy in the face of criticism from such agencies as the UNHCR, arguing that immigration levels fell by around 90% as a result.

Less than two years later the ECHR would rule that this policy was in clear violation of the European Convention of Human Rights; and more damning still, Mifsud Bonnici's government found itself condemning the Libyan government in the face of the Libyan civil war.

Mifsud Bonnici was therefore compelled to admit (albeit indirectly) that he had supported a policy of sending immigrants back to a country that his own government now condemned for its human rights abuses. The outbreak of civil hostilities in Libya in 2011 also placed the home affairs minister in the awkward position of having to reconcile his 'new' views about Gaddafi, with his earlier outspoken defence of the dictator's regime. After all, it was Carm Mifsud Bonnici who criticised this newspaper for writing about Libya's human rights atrocities regarding immigration in 2009: a time when Gaddafi was openly blackmailing Europe for an injection of €25 billion over five years.

"It is a mistake to speak out against Libya in this issue," he said, in a comment that he would afterwards have plenty of leisure to regret. "We recognise that immigration is also a problem for Libya, and we are doing our bit by putting pressure on Europe to offer more aid to Libya to help it control its borders."

Law Courts reform

If Mifsud Bonnici was perceived as an agent of continuity in home affairs, the same cannot really be said for his handling of the justice portfolio. Here, a concerted effort can indeed be descried to overhaul judicial practices to ensure more expeditious justice... though the success or otherwise of these initiatives is naturally open to interpretation.

Individual efforts included a modest increase in resources allocated to the Small Claims Tribunal in order to lighten the caseload before the magistrates' court... though this must be counterbalanced by a dearth of resources available to the Family Court,  apart from the introduction of the badly managed mediation process in the cases of separation and maintenance claims.

Be that as it may, this is an area where Mifsud Bonnici can claim limited success. The Gozo Law Courts in particular has significantly reduced its pending caseload thanks in part to the appointment of two permanent magistrates... though Mifsud Bonnici has to date resisted the idea of assigning a full-time judge to the sister island.

More controversially, he also suggested that the Chief Justice should assume responsibility for assigning judges' and magistrates' caseloads directly - an idea that reportedly did not go down too well with the judiciary as a whole.

All the same, certain intrinsic problems associated with the law courts have persisted in spite of sporadic, isolated improvements here and there. Cases continue to be routinely deferred without any apparent justification, and trials often take far too long to reach judgment at first instance... though it is difficult to determine exactly how much of the blame for this state of affairs can be laid at the minister's door.

One area where Mifsud Bonnici has raised eyebrows concerns the appointment of judges and magistrates: something that Maltese law leaves entirely at the minister's discretion... an uncomfortable scenario, which reduces the position of any judge or magistrate to the status of glorified 'government appointee'.

Leaving aside a reluctance on government's part to rectify this evident anomaly in our justice system, lawyers have variously commented that Mifsud Bonnici's choices have often been dictated more by concerns of a moral/religious nature, than by the chosen candidates' experience and legal prowess.

As a result, Mifsud Bonnici has been accused of exploiting the discretion allowed him by law to litter the magistrates' bench with a surprisingly young generation of lawyers hand-picked for their 'Christians values'... thus charting the general ideological direction of the courts, in a way that is difficult for any future administration to reverse.

Morality matters

It is on the subject of moral concerns that Mifsud Bonnici has occasionally allowed his tenure of office to plummet into the domain of the ridiculous. No assessment of his career can really be complete without a mention of how the law courts were briefly hijacked by ludicrous 'moral' cases - the mass-prosecution of Carnival party-goers in religious costume being the best example - which sometimes made Malta the butt of international jokes.

Two cases that stand out concern the ban on a surprisingly uncontroversial play called Stitching, for reasons which have never been fully made clear. Initially, the Censorship Board (now defunct) objected to 'every aspect' of the play; but when pressed for a more specific reason, the chairperson cited 'blasphemy' and 'disrespect for the victims of the Holocaust' as official reasons.

The second issue involved criminal charges levelled against an author and student editor over 'obscene' literature published in a campus magazine - which achieved international attention in the form of an embarrassing Al Jazeera exclusive which painted Malta out as a veritable hive of militant religious censors.

Mifsud Bonnici may not have been directly responsible for either prosecution; but his outspoken support of the beleaguered Censorship Board - as well as his astounding decision to dramatically increase the penalties for obscenity laws, even as the case against Ir-Realta' was in full swing - left no one in any doubt as to his own tacit support for such initiatives.

Significantly, Attorney General Peter Grech - one of Mifsud Bonnici's appointees - would greatly compound the impression of a 'Government of God' approach, with the remarkable wording of his appeal against the acquittal of author Alex Vella Gera and editor Mark Camilleri:

"The author must realise that there are other people living with him who do not share his same ideas, preferences or tastes and that there is God above everything and everyone - God, who is definitely bigger than the biggest ego of the most celebrated authors," Grech intoned, in an appeal that was duly rejected by the Law Courts.