Prime Minister Robert Abela “thinks he can engage in some form of bullying against the judiciary”, PN spokesperson for Justice Karol Aquilina said in reference to comments the Prime Minister has made about the Jean Paul Sofia magisterial inquiry.
Sofia, aged 20, died when a building under construction in Kordin collapsed on 3 December 2022.
On Monday, just hours before thousands gathered for a vigil in remembrance of Jean Paul Sofia, which his family organised in Valletta, Abela announced that a public inquiry will be launched after months of refusing to set one up.
On Friday Abela announced that the magisterial inquiry had been concluded, but he had been vocal about “delays” in the magisterial inquiry over the previous weeks. During the public inquiry announcement on Monday, Abela had said that the magistrate had notified that another extension was needed, and took aim at the length of time the inquiry was taking.
Abela had said on that day that he was still convinced that the best method was to allow the magisterial inquiry to conclude, publish the process verbally and then hold administrative inquiries to close any loose ends. “I still think that this is the best procedure, but unfortunately that is not possible because we have a magisterial inquiry dragging its feet. Almost eight months have passed and there is no end in sight. This is why the government is not going to remain a hostage to the courts,” Abela had said. He had said that the report of the magistrate’s extension that day made them act.
The magisterial inquiry has since been concluded – last Friday – and some arrests have been made.
But Aquilina doesn’t believe that Abela’s decision to launch the public inquiry was due to the length of time the magisterial inquiry took.
Aquilina, speaking with this newsroom on Thursday, said that just a few days before the public inquiry was announced Abela had not backed the PN’s motion for one to be launched in Parliament. “He voted against the public inquiry (…)
“I spoke with more than four of them,” he said, adding that “they tell you they’ve lost touch, that he’s hard-headed, that he got into this and didn’t know how to solve it, that the people will not forgive them for this.” But, he said, they had to toe the party line. “What happened to the Prime Minister, I think, is that he was stubborn and made everyone on his side of Parliament vote against. Naturally there was the obvious and justified reaction by the family and the Maltese people.”
Aquilina referred to the family’s reaction to the vote in Parliament, where they yelled at MPs telling those who didn’t back the call for a public inquiry that they should be ashamed of themselves and saying “hug your children Prime Minister, because we can’t hug Jean Paul”. In that moment, Aquilina said, the family weren’t just representing themselves, but also the call of the people, that a public inquiry was justified.
“The Prime Minister then realised and saw the obvious, and so began trying to find a way out. Instead of saying ‘I made a mistake in taking that vote, in resisting the call to launch a public inquiry all this time’, he tried to blame the inquiring magistrate.”
Aquilina said that Abela is “blaming the magistrate to try and deflect attention from his own failings. I completely condemn the Prime Minister’s behaviour regarding the magistrate, the judiciary”, he said, adding that Abela “thinks he can engage in some form of bullying against the judiciary, thinks that he can in some way control them. One insists that the judiciary does its work, but without attacking them and trying to turn anger against them.”
Asked, before it concluded, what are the implications of the Prime Minister having pressured the magistrate to work more expeditiously and sending two letters to the Chief Justice over the past months, Aquilina said that it is a fundamental principle for the three organs of the state not to trample over each other, “meaning that the judiciary operates and acts according to its regulations and the executive does not interfere in the judiciary. Naturally, the executive has an obligation to provide the judiciary with the means to do their job, as it should. One of our criticisms as to why the justice system doesn’t move forward is that the government doesn’t invest in it. It doesn’t invest in the wages of the workers in court, doesn’t invest in resources, for example.”
“I consider the letters sent by the Prime Minister as being totally condemnable. The best response was given by the Chief Justice, who did not respond to those letters. The letters are unacceptable in our democratic society.” Robert Abela was doing this on purpose, he said. “Instead of accepting responsibility for not calling a public inquiry in the first place, he was trying to incite people against the judiciary, trying to blame others.”
“As a lawyer who spent years practicing in court, he knows the weight that judges and magistrates carry, the difficulties there are, and that, contrary to what he says, resources are limited in our justice system,” Aquilina said.
Asked whether it is normal for magisterial inquiries to take so long, Aquilina said there are a number of them that do so. “Abela worries about a magisterial inquiry taking seven months but doesn’t mind that there are magisterial inquiries that have been ongoing for three to four years, like ones regarding Vitals Global Healthcare, 17 Black and others which are also very serious. Those don’t worry him and he never wrote to the Chief Justice about them.”
“Naturally there is a problem. At the end of May we had 1,650 pending magisterial inquiries. They aren’t conducted by magistrates who have nothing else to do. They are conducted by magistrates who are also working on all their other cases,” he said, while giving examples. “One magistrate, for example, has 158 pending inquiries, in addition to nearly 1,500 pending cases and 219 compilations of evidence,” he said. “How can a magistrate do all this work?” He said that another magistrate has 373 compilations of evidence, another magistrate who has 1,269 domestic violence cases, while clarifying that these are not the same magistrate who led the inquiry into Sofia’s death.
“What is the solution?” he asked rhetorically. “To increase the number of magistrates, remove inquiries from the present magistrates and have them start being tackled by a pool of magistrates specialised on inquiries, as we have long been saying. The Prime Minister says he agrees and that they will appoint four. If he thinks he will solve the magisterial inquiry problem by appointing only four magistrates to conduct these inquiries he has no idea about how the system works and the difficulties. Aside from that, I am informed that the government wants to make this change but leave all the pending inquiries to the present magistrates, which means that the difficulties will remain.”
Asked about the Prime Minister’s statements that he never ruled out a public inquiry to begin with, but rather wanted the magisterial inquiry to end first, Aquilina argued that Abela is against the setting up of public inquiries. “Don’t forget Robert Abela had also voted against a public inquiry into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.”
“He doesn’t believe public inquiries should be launched, not in this case, nor any other case. He is against public scrutiny on the government’s operations. If a Prime Minister has a suspicion that something was wrong then he would do it immediately, and not pass the country through a period of anxiety.”
“Unfortunately in this country we don’t have the culture of public inquiries, but we need to start opening up our institutions to public scrutiny like this.”
He denied the Prime Minister’s accusations that the PN was capitalising on the grief of Sofia’s family, saying “it is absolutely not true”.
“Isabelle Bonnici spent weeks and months running after every MP, from both the PL and PN. Isabelle Bonnici is probably one of the people who came the most outside Parliament to speak to MPs and explain why she needed their support. Bonnici wrote to MPs a number of times, ran a campaign for justice for her son and she did so with everyone, not just the PN. We offered her our support as we feel that she is right in her requests and that she was asking for something that obviously should have been done. We carried our responsibility to represent the people and did what Bonnici was requesting. In our motion, we took care to address, exactly, the points that Isabelle Bonnici was asking for. She rightly expected Parliament to vote in favour no matter who the motion came from.”
Told that there have been many construction site tragedies over the years yet the PN jumped on this one, and that some could see this as the PN jumping on the bandwagon, he said that this is not the case. “For example, when Miriam Pace died the PN had spoken. I had personally attended the vigil, which was right before the pandemic and a group of MPs had also gone on site. A few weeks later, we tabled a motion for a public inquiry as well. This isn’t the first time we said that a public inquiry was needed. In the case of Miriam Pace we had filed a motion for a public inquiry. It didn’t get to be discussed in Parliament, even due to the way the Parliamentary sessions are allocated to the Opposition, but I assure you that our position, on every death, is that we want the truth to come out.”
The Nationalist Party recently filed a complaint to the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life asking him to investigate Prime Minister Abela and Justice Minister Jonathan Attard about statements they both made with regard to the magisterial inquiry into the death of Jean Paul Sofia, in reference to the statement they made that the magistrate leading the inquiry had notified the Attorney General that it will be extended by 30 days.
Aquilina said that the AG, constitutionally, is independent from the government. “Nobody could interfere in what the AG decides or doesn’t decide. The AG is also tied to the obligation of confidentiality in magisterial inquiries as she receives information regarding them. The way the Prime Minister and Justice Minister spoke showed that they were communicating with the AG and I believe they were expecting information from her, information to which they had no right. Now I don’t have any problem with things becoming known to the public, actually I am in favour of it, but not for the Prime Minister and the Justice Minister to get to know through abuse of power.”
On Friday, Abela then announced that the magisterial inquiry had been concluded. Contacted again after this, Aquilina said that Abela has a right to write to the Attorney General to request a copy of the inquiry, “but the AG doesn’t have to obey him. She has to decide what to do. It was irresponsible for the Prime Minister to make it sound like a fact that the magisterial inquiry would be published. That is a decision that the AG has to take. I am in favour of it being published, but not through some form of abuse of power whereby the Prime Minister orders her to do that, as the AG decides herself and nobody is meant to interfere in her work”.
Told that Abela refuted that anyone gave him information he shouldn’t have had and instead pointed fingers at former and current PN MPs who he said give information about confidential magisterial inquiries, Aquilina said: “Firstly, current or former MPs aren’t in power, so they don’t have an executive post. So it means that if there is a journalist exposing things Abela is also blaming them? The problem is that he is the Prime Minister, not anyone else, and he is interfering with the AG by ordering her what to do. He demanded information from her that he wasn’t meant to have. How did he know that the magisterial inquiry was not ready? Nobody knew.”
Aquilina claims that Abela didn’t ask the AG for information, but demanded it. “That is abuse of power.”
In addition, Aquilina also believes that on Friday the Prime Minister continued to target the magistrate, “increasing the dose by alluding to how long she took, blaming her and implying that it is nearly her fault that people were ang