PN’s homegrown critic says party gave blessing to ‘most dangerous’ vilification law

The decriminalisation of religious vilification was strongly denounced by PN MP Jason Azzopardi as “the government’s most dangerous and short-sighted decision yet”. 

Yet when push came to shove, the Opposition unanimously voted in favour of the law as part of a legal package that was intended to boost freedom of speech. 

The jury is out on whether the Opposition could have voted against the decriminalisation of vilification without having had to vote against the entire Bill, that also included provisions to criminalise revenge porn and decriminalize soft pornography. 

Opposition Whip David Agius has argued that the Opposition didn’t call a division of votes at the third reading because it would have gone against parliamentary procedures. 

However, when asked, Speaker Anglu Farrugia did not give a straight answer as to whether this would have been the case. 

“I don’t get into debates, except for debates with my conscience,” he told MaltaToday. “When MPs want to clarify issues of parliamentary procedure, they can request a Speaker’s ruling, but no ruling was requested in this case.

“If a ruling had been requested, then I would have studied the Standing Orders and made a decision, but I cannot comment on the potential outcome of a ruling that wasn’t requested.” 

He noted that in the absence of clarity in the Standing Orders, Parliament refers to practices of the UK’s House of Commons, in which Bills have on rare occasions been amended at the third reading stage on matters of principle.

It took less than a month since the passing of Bill 113 through Parliament for the first controversy to break out – when slices of bacon were found in copies of the Koran at Mater Dei earlier this month. 

Justice minister Owen Bonnici has insisted that the culprit can be prosecuted under religious hated laws, but the PN has warned that the decriminalisation of vilification means that the act of desecration will go unpunished “thanks to Joseph Muscat’s and Owen Bonnici’s hard-headedness.”

However, Simon Mercieca, a history lecturer who co-authored a report on the PN’s 2013 electoral loss, has taken the Opposition to task for its “sheer hypocrisy” in coming out against the proposed decriminalisation of vilification but not asking for a division in the third reading. 

“In the last three years, the PN has been guided by the idea that it needs to become more liberal in order to win the next election. However, it is now clear that it is in for a big surprise; the forces of liberalism are not strong enough to make the PN win. On the other hand, the PN appears more and more opportunistic and its leader, weaker than ever,” he wrote in a Malta Independent blogpost. “There is no doubt that that the PN is far more interested in joining the Liberals and the European Left in their attempts to eliminate Christianity from the European spectrum rather than abide by its core beliefs…The PN joined Labour and agreed to remove the vilification law to please Obama’s America and the Liberals and Left of the EU. Having realised their crass mistake, the Nationalists are now rallying to oppose this new law tooth and nail. They are attempting to recover lost ground by declaring that they were right in opposing the removal of vilification when, in reality, they supported it.” 

In another post, he noted that some Labour MPs – notably Manuel Mallia, Jose Herrera and Godfrey Farrugia – had criticised the plans to strike off vilification from the Criminal Code.  

“Whenever government MPs aren’t toing the government line, it is the duty of the Opposition to start asking for votes on each and every reading. But clearly, supporting revenge porn, the removal of any reference to Roman Catholicism, and allowing sex shops and brothels [sic], has now become more important for the Opposition than checking whether government has a full majority when passing a pill.”

Opposition Whip David Agius has argued that PN had already made its objections to the Bill clear during the second reading debate, and during committee stage. 

“The three PN MPs on the committee voted against the clause to decriminalize vilification, but they were outvoted by the four Labour MPs,” he told MaltaToday. “If Labour MPs had issues with the clause, then they should have voted against it at committee stage.

“During the third reading, where a vote is taken on the Bill as a whole, the Opposition did not vote against the Bill for the simple reason that voting “no” at that stage implies being against the entire Bill,” he wrote in a letter to the Independent. “How can anyone expect the Opposition to vote against an entire Bill when it was agreeing with almost all of it, except in one amendment in just one clause?”

Mercieca retorted by accusing Agius of ignorance of parliamentary procedure, arguing that the Standing Orders don’t forbid the Opposition from requesting an itemized vote in the second or third reading.